LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



Chap.. L Copyright So.. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE 



Problem of Reform 



by s. c. eby. 



'The Lord God Omnipotent reigneth."— Apocalypse. 



APR £ 1897 J 



ST. LOUIS: 
THE NEW-CHURCH BOOK-ROOM, 
Delmar and Spring Aves. 
1897. 




Copyright, 1897, by S. C. Eby. 



PREFACE. 



THE essays on "The Spiritual Philosophy 
of Natural Reform " were published in 
series in the New-Church Messenger, at 
the particular request of its editor, in January 
and February of last year. 

The chapters on " The Church and the 
World " were written afterward at the sugges- 
tion of an esteemed friend in London, in order 
to elucidate the complemental truths involved 
in the doctrine that if it were not for the 
Church the human race would become insane 
and perish. 

The first three of the " Miscellaneous Es- 
says " did service some years ago as editori- 
als in the Messenger, and the one on " Civiliza- 
tion and Christianity " first saw the light as an 
editorial in New- Church Reading Circle. The 
interest they awakened when they first ap- 
peared seems to make their republication ex- 
cusable. 

St. Louis y March 2^th y 1897. «* 



CONTENTS. 

Introduction, 7 

Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform : 

I. A Doctrinal Deduction, . . ij 
II. An Historical Synthesis, 31 

III. The Utilitarian Value of Self-Love, 48 

IV. The Modification of the Spiritual by 

the Natural, .... 62 

The Church and the World : 

/. The Church the Motive of Creation, 75 
II. The Unconscious Mediumship of the 

Church, . . . . . 88 

III. The Church's Responsible Ministry of 

Sacred Things, . . . 108 

IV. The Churches Influence on External 

Social Life, .... 115 

Miscellaneous Essays : 

/. The Heart of Reform, . . . ijj 

II Ccesar and the Church, . , . ij<p 

III. National Righteousness, . . 145 

IV. Civilization and Christianity, . . iji 



INTRODUCTION. 



OR some years reforms and their claims 



upon the attention of the New Church 



have worn a very problematic aspect. 
Those who have been impressed chiefly by the 
value of a correct environment, and by the 
doctrine that the world is necessarily the 
arena of spiritual life, have thought that the 
Church should professedly co-operate with 
reform agencies; while those who have been 
convinced especially of the spiritual character 
of the Church's message, and of the regener- 
ate life as a matter of individual choice and 
experience, have thought that the Church had 
no legitimate interest in or direct relation to 
processes of external reformation. My little 
book does not endorse either one or other of 
these positions. Each represents but a half- 
truth in its premises, and both are fallacious in 
their conclusions. In the following chapters a 
point of view will be found from which the 
reader can appreciate natural reforms not only 
at their face or external value, but at their full 
or cumulative value as serviceable to heavenly 
life; and at the same time can see how the 




8 



The Problem of Reform. 



Church is of immense significance to natural 
progress, and is deeply interested in external 
changes while fulfilling a distinctively spiritual 
mission. 

The complaint has come to me again and 
again that some of our ministers have given so 
much of their time and attention to natural 
reforms that it has seriously interfered with 
their usefulness as teachers of an authoritative 
spiritual Gospel. If this be true, it is a great 
misfortune ; for our ministers, in the degree 
that they are qualified for their work, have just 
those truths concerning the Lord, the mind of 
man, immortality, righteousness, and the living 
creativeness of the Word that the better class 
of religious minds in the Churches and out of 
them are blindly and lamely groping after. 
What a pity, when they are asking for bread, 
to give them a stone ! For the very best truth 
that makes only for this world's good is, in the 
light of heaven, merely solidified dust. 

But, on the other hand, if any of the min- 
isters or others have advocated reforms under 
inexpedient circumstances or with unwise in- 
tent, they must not be choked off with bad 
doctrine and worse logic. Rash and incompe- 
tent reasoning, even from true premises and 
for good purposes, is not to be condoned in 



Introduction. 



9 



the New Church. To attempt to cure a prac- 
tical error of sentiment or tendency to habit 
by untenable principles or irrational arguments 
is to provide a remedy that is worse than the 
disease. We have been too prone to read the 
adverb " intellectualiter" in the motto over the 
entrance to the temple of wisdom as simply 
conferring a privilege, as though, while hither- 
to men had the things of faith only as matters 
of memory and obedience, now everybody so 
inclined might rush in and know all about their 
interior riches. But to my mind intellectualiter 
means as much of restriction and obligation as 
it does of opportunity and liberty. We may 
enter in, and know and possess and enjoy the 
things within the vail provided we do it under- 
standingly. Reflection, reconsideration, self- 
criticism, contemplation of the same subject 
in many points of view, exact knowledge of 
the terms in which doctrine is couched, and a 
perception of the bearings of the principles of 
our philosophy on the matter in hand are indis- 
pensable requirements in the writer who would 
teach men to think rationally. The distinc- 
tive ear-mark of our faith is intense and per- 
sistent rationality. Unless we have given a 
subject a thorough, searching study on its 
natural side and on its spiritual side, we 



10 



The Problem of Reform. 



should go softly as touching that theme all 
our days. 

Natural reforms are necessary, and the 
work of bringing them about may be as holy 
as any other. Hence, the New-Churchman as 
an individual and a citizen has a perfect right 
to be a reformer. As such, of course it would 
be absurd for him to demand that the Church 
go into the business of external reform, but he 
is quite justified in expecting that his Church 
will so teach the doctrines that bear upon the 
subject that he may be able to delight in the 
indirect spiritual uses as well as in the direct 
natural benefits of the cause for which he is 
working, and that he may be able to do with 
an enlarged idea and heavenly motive that 
which a merely carnal reformer does only from 
self-love and love of the world. 

I have not treated of any specific reforms, 
but have dealt exclusively with principles. 
The truths I have elaborated concerning the 
Divine order on the civil plane were in force 
when Augustus founded the Empire of the 
Caesars, and will remain unchanged when our 
current reforms have interest only as matters 
of ancient history. 



The Spiritual Philosophy of 
Natural Reform. 



I 



I, 



A DOCTRINAL DEDUCTION. 
EFORE we can with any adequate intel- 



ligence discuss the obligations of the 



Church in reference to social questions, 
we must in some degree understand the relation 
which subsists between civil formation or re-for- 
mation and the common spiritual life of man- 
kind. According to our idea of this primary 
and fundamental relationship will be our con- 
viction of what ought to be the Church's de- 
liberate and voluntary attitude to external re- 
construction. 

Unfortunately there has been a great deal 
written on the Church's duty in this matter 
without even a discriminating definition of re- 
forms themselves. Thus we have seen some 
strange cataloguing: Christian science and 
mind-cure, strikes and lock-outs, and all sorts 
of civic, economic, and eleemosynary move- 
ments have been bunched together. Then we 
have been told that the Church can take no 
cognizance of these things, because they are 
natural and self-seeking in their aims and 
methods; and that all true civic and economic 




i/f. Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

reforms must be unselfish, and come into effect 
as the result of the regeneration of individ- 
uals. This kind of dogmatizing is most un- 
happy, because it affronts the intelligence at 
once of every scientific student of sociology 
and of every thoughtful man of the Church 
who, taking our doctrines seriously, has en- 
deavored by their aid to understand the mar- 
velous workings of Divine Providence in the 
transformations of history and the develop- 
ment of social consciousness. 

We have been told, and the theory has 
been reiterated ad nauseam, that New- 
Churchmen need not concern themselves with 
external change and progress ; that their great 
business is to get regenerated ; that regenera- 
tion precedes and reformation follows ; that 
regeneration is the cause and reforms the ef- 
fect ; that men as individuals must voluntarily 
accept salvation, and that then all necessary 
and adequate reforms of a civil and economic 
character will follow as a matter of course. 

Now, whatever may be the correct theory 
of the relation of the organized New Church 
to external reforms (with which subject this 
essay is not concerned), I desire to record my 
dissent from the whole argument by which it 
has been attempted to establish this particular 



A Doctrinal Deduction. 



theory of civil reform through individual re- 
generation. In my opinion this notion has no 
logical ground either in doctrine or in fact. 
In examining the principle involved, I shall 
for the most part consider the subject of dis- 
tinctively civil reforms, because these belong 
to the ultimate or lowest plane of social exist- 
ence, which is the basis of all man's associate 
reaction to the Divine life ; and if we grasp 
the significance of changing or re-formings 
modes of life on this plane, as dealing with 
land, labor, and capital, or those natural re- 
sources serviceable directly to man's earthly- 
development and indirectly to his spiritual 
progress, we shall be prepared to understand 
those moral movements that grow out of alter- 
ing political conditions, on the one hand, and 
a varying mediate influx from heaven or hell,, 
on the other. 

We have been referred for light on the sub- 
ject to the doctrine of the Lord's glorification 
of his humanity and the redemption of our 
race. It has been affirmed that we must ac- 
knowledge the means by which his humanity 
was made Divine. The doctrine of redemp- 
tion ought certainly to give a commanding in- 
sight into a universal theory of reform ; for it 
supplies the best possible point of view from. 



16 Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

which to contemplate the entire range of sub- 
jects relating alike to the internal and external 
man. Let us see where a knowledge of the 
means of our Lord's glorification leads us. 
In " True Christian Religion " we read : 

u The two purposes for which the Lord came 
into the world, and by which He saved men and an- 
gels, are these, redemption and the glorification of 
his humanity. These two are distinct from each 
other, but yet they make one with respect to salva- 
tion. It has been shown in the foregoing articles 
that redemption was a combat with the hells and 
their subjugation, and afterward the orderly estab- 
lishment of the heavens. But glorification was the 
uniting of the Lord's humanity with the divinity of 
his Father, which was effected by successive steps, 
and was fully completed by the passion of the cross. 
So every man on his part ought to approach toward 
God, and as he so approaches, God enters on His 
part in the same proportion " (126). 

"The reason why union was effected by acts of 
redemption is that the Lord performed those acts by 
his humanity, and as He performed them, in the 
same degree the divinity, which is understood by the 
Father, approached, assisted, and co-operated, till at 
length they were so conjoined as to be no longer two, 
but one ; and this union was the glorification " (97). 

" It is in this case as with a temple, which must 
first be built by men's hands, and afterward conse- 
crated, and lastly sanctified by prayer, that God 
would make it the abode of his presence, and unite 
himself with his Church assembled there" (126). 

"AH this process was accomplished because Di- 
vine order requires that a man should prepare him- 



A Doctrinal Deduction. iy 



self for the reception of God ; and in proportion as 
he so prepares himself God enters into him as into 
his house and habitation. Such preparation is ef- 
fected by means of the knowledge of God and of 
the spiritual doctrines of the Church, and a conse- 
quent intelligence and wisdom ; for it is a law of or- 
der that in proportion as a man approaches and 
draws nigh unto God, which he ought to do entirely 
as of himself, in the same proportion God approaches 
and draws nigh unto him, and conjoins himself with 
him in the middle region of his mind. That the 
Lord proceeded according to this order, even to 
union with his Father, will be further proved in the 
following sections " (89). 

The clear doctrine is that our Lord, pro- 
ceeding according to his own Divine order, 
made his humanity Divine by degrees, in the 
measure that He had first externally prepared 
it for his divinity, by his combats with and vic- 
tories over the hells. Here we have in con- 
summate perfection a Divine revelation of the 
principles which must operate in all the evolu- 
tions of life, in the domain of nature, of his- 
tory, and of regeneration. By all logical rea- 
soning, from the laws of Divine order, from 
correspondence, from analogy, we are bound 
to conclude that the doctrine of redemption 
shows, if it shows anything on the subject, 
that reforms must precede genuine spiritual 
life, whether in the case of the individual man, 

2 



18 Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 



or in the establishment of a Church, or in the 
reconstruction of society; and that it is totally 
absurd to suspend, until mankind are regener- 
ated, the beneficent institution of those re- 
forms of the moral and civil order which ev- 
ery man of common sense can appreciate as 
well in an unregenerate condition as in a state 
of angelic perfection. 

What is true of our Lord's glorification is 
true of man's private spiritual regeneration. 
That regeneration does not precede reforma- 
tion, and is not the cause of it. On the con- 
trary, the reformation prepares the way for the 
regeneration, and is an indispensable condition 
of it. 

"The human mind grows like the body, save 
only that the body grows in stature and the mind in 
wisdom ; and thus the latter is exalted from one re- 
gion to another, from the natural region to the spir- 
itual, and from this to the celestial. In the last re- 
gion a man is called wise ; in the middle, intelligent, 
and in the first or lowest, scientific. But this exalta- 
tion of mind is not sudden, but is effected by de- 
grees, in proportion as a man stores his mind with 
truths and conjoins those truths with good. It is in 
this case as in the building of a house. The builder 
first provides materials for the work, as bricks, tiles, 
beams, and rafters ; he then lays the foundation, 
raises the walls, divides it into separate apartments, 
makes doors to each, with windows to admit the 
light, and stairs to ascend from one story to another; 



A Doctrinal Deduction. ip 



all which are included and exist at the same time in 
the end proposed, which is a commodious and hand- 
some habitation, The case is the same with a tem- 
ple. While it is building, all the component parts 
exist together in the end proposed, which is the wor- 
ship of God. It is the same also in all other cases, 
as in gardens and fields, and likewise in offices and 
employments, in which the end proposed supplies it- 
self with all needful means for its accomplishment " 
(T. C. R. 152). 

It is true that I have not yet reached the 
plane where civil reforms belong. I wish the 
reader first to understand the subject of reform 
in the external man as regarded in a purely 
theological point of view. Here, if ever, we 
should expect to see reform processes the ef- 
fect of regenerative development. For in this 
case all the diverse interests of man's com- 
plex nature still belong to one personality. 
In a certain sense all things in him are obedi- 
ent to one consciousness. What occurs touch- 
ing any change of character or condition has 
reference to one and the same individual. All 
the degrees of the mind, all the planes of life, 
all the levels of correspondence unite in the 
same sentient entity. Moreover, when the in- 
dividual has begun the regenerate life, the 
whole of him is bound sooner or later to be- 
come responsive to the ruling love of good, 



20 Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

and hence we may say that the entire man is 
committed to the work of his own reconstruc- 
tion. Here surely we may see regeneration 
precede and reformation follow? But directly 
the opposite is the fact and the doctrine. 

But, if it be true in the case of the individ- 
ual, where the man himself sympathizes and 
co-operates with what is doing for his inward 
renovation, that the external house must be 
set in order before the regenerate spiritual life 
can descend to dwell in it, how much more ne- 
cessity shall we find for the application of this 
law in the establishment of the Church in a 
world of mixed good and evil — a world in 
which we have no a priori grounds for the 
presumption that a spiritual Gospel will ever 
be accorded a universal reception. If men 
are really held in freedom in reference to spir- 
itual life, they are free to remain natural to the 
end of the chapter; and we have no logical 
basis for the notion that, as the Lord's king- 
dom grow r s in the minds of the regenerate, 
there will not be a multitude of the unregen- 
erate in every age persistently refusing to be 
softened and guided by the direct influence of 
the Church. Only that man can hear the Gos- 
pel of unselfishness who has an ear, and the 
formation of that ear is strictly a private mat- 



A Doctrinal Deduction. 21 



ter between himself and his God. But every 
man not an idiot is born with a most genuine 
alertness to those interests which he can see 
to fit in with his self-love and world-love. And 
all external reformation that is worth the name 
appeals directly to these loves, which Almighty 
God has created for the precise purpose of be- 
ing an effective and ever-present ground for 
solicitations and instigations in behalf of natu- 
ral well-doing. 

" The love of self and the love of the world by 
creation are heavenly loves ; for they are loves of 
the natural man serviceable to spiritual loves, as a 
foundation is to a house. For man, from the love of 
self and the world, seeks the welfare of 'his body, de- 
sires food, clothing, and habitation, is solicitous for 
the good of his family, and to secure employment 
for the sake of use, and even, in the interest of obe- 
dience, to be honored according to the dignity of the 
affairs which he administers, and to find delight and 
refreshment in worldly enjoyment; yet all this for the 
sake of the end, which must be use. For through 
these things man is in a state to serve the Lord and 
to serve the neighbor" (D. L. W. 396). 

" The natural degree of life, viewed in itself, 
loves nothing but self and the world, for it coheres 
with the senses of the body, which also reach out to 
the world; while the spiritual degree of life, viewed 
in itself, loves the Lord and heaven, and also self and 
the world, but God and heaven as higher, principal, 
and predominant, and self and the world as lower, 
instrumental, and subservient" (D. P. 324; T. C. R. 
394, 395)- 



22 Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 



If it be true that the loves of self and the 
world are the proximate loves of good or an- 
gelic men when they are dealing with those 
natural instrumentalities which are capable of 
serving mediate uses to spiritual ends, how 
certain it must be that the average man, the 
man of the world, can be regulated and guided 
only through those loves. The vision and de- 
light of the natural man are limited by an 
earthly horizon. We are plainly taught in the 
" Doctrine of Charity" the kind of good which 
the natural man easily appreciates. There are 
three degrees of good — civil, moral, and spir- 
itual ; men are in civil good before they are in 
moral good, and in civil and moral good be- 
fore they are in spiritual good ; civil good and 
moral good are designed to be the habitation 
of spiritual good ; they precede it, and after 
spiritual good comes it gives a new and heav- 
enly quality to these prepared states; but, re- 
garded in,4tself : 

" Civil good is the good of a life in accordance 
with the civil laws ; and its first and fundamental 
principle — not to act contrary to those laws — is on 
account of the penalties attached. If within this 
good there is not moral good, and within this spirit- 
ual good, it is none other than the animal good 
which beasts exhibit, when kept shut up or chained, 
toward those who give them food, or who punish 



A Doctrinal Deduction. 23 



them or caress them. . . . Through his civil 
good a man is a man of the world" (34, 35). 

The true end of civil government is so to 
regulate human activity and association that 
the natural resources of the earth shall not be 
wrongfully withheld from those who are justly 
entitled to them, and that none shall be de- 
barred from striving for a higher, interior life 
on the basis of an earthly experience. Hence 
every reform that has registered a distinct ad- 
vance for any part of the human race has giv- 
en men an easier access to or multiplied com- 
mand over the products of nature, or has 
produced conditions in which they obtained 
greater freedom to work out the thought that 
was in them. Such civil order as we have in 
any age comes from the restraint and direction 
of man's necessitous self-love by a principle of 
justice made practical and effective by the 
strong arm of the law. The civil plane per se 
knows nothing of spiritual motives and purely 
moral considerations. Its all-comprehensive 
law is necessity. The demand for food, cloth- 
ing, and shelter carries all before it, and he 
who would move men as civil beings must ad- 
dress himself to their self-regarding instincts. 

Into the civil plane all men are born and 
on it they are developed before they can be 



2 £ Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

initiated into regenerate spiritual life. For 
some time, in the nature of the case, every 
one is civil and not spiritual. Very large 
numbers of human beings are in civil good all 
their lives without ever becoming consciously 
confirmed in spiritual good or evil. Multi- 
tudes are good and useful civil men, when 
judged objectively or naturally, who in spirit- 
ual light are seen to be full of every kind of 
evil lust and predisposition to iniquity. Even 
those who allow themselves to be measurably 
regenerated have still their interests in the civil 
order, and cannot be separated from it without 
injury. The simple fact is that all who are 
born upon the earth — whatever may be their 
inward affiliations to good or evil — are alike 
dependent on the civil plane as the basis of 
their existence. Good, bad, and indifferent 
are in one and the same boat. What, then, in 
plain truth, is the efficient motive of those re- 
forms which under Providence effect lasting 
benefits, directly for all men as civil beings, 
and indirectly for those who wish to become 
spiritual? Is it the spiritual love of the Lord 
and the neighbor — a love of which the vast 
majority know nothing, and of which even the 
minority at first know nothing, and at last and 
at best in this mortal state know very little ? 



A Doctrinal Deduction, 25 



Or is it the love of self and the love of the 
world (by creation heavenly loves), which the 
Divine Providence makes sure that every in- 
fant is surcharged with, and which even the re- 
generating man knows to beat vigorously with 
every pulse of his will and every respiration of 
his understanding? The Lord always adapts 
means to ends ; and when the end is the prog- 
ress of mankind on the civil plane, the means 
must be that ubiquitous self-love that is as 
broad and deep and intense as man's natural 
consciousness. 

The absolute irrefragability of this doctrine 
will be seen by the reader more clearly when 
he reflects that civic and economic problems 
arise from matters which are not mainly of in- 
dividual limitation and private choice. All 
things Divine and heavenly come to man as a 
distinct individual. Spiritually he is consid- 
ered and addressed as a sheer solitary; but 
naturally men are lumped according to the vi- 
cissitudes of climate, soil, location, transporta- 
tion, and whatever regulates the food supply. 
Consequently, civil disorders and disarrange- 
ments affect large numbers of people regard- 
less of the good or evil of their interior mo- 
tives. If a great disorder prevail for long it 
brings disaster on every individual in the com- 



26 Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 



munity. So a great national blessing or re- 
form works for the impartial good of multi- 
tudes without taking the slightest cognizance 
of their inward quality. Not only is it unnec- 
essary for society to wait for the regeneration 
of its individual members, before it can enjoy 
the fruits of external reforms, but so far as 
the civil plane of life is concerned, the evil 
are as fully competent to receive the good of 
those reforms as the regenerate. 

At this juncture it is important to have a 
clear idea of the relation of civil good to the 
good of man's higher degrees of life. In the 
" Doctrine of Charity" we read: 

" The general good consists in these things : That 
in the society or kingdom there shall be, I. What is 
Divine among them. II. That there shall be justice 
among them. III. That there shall be morality 
among them. IV. That there shall be industry, 
knowledge, and uprightness among them. V. That 
there shall be the necessaries of life. VI. That there 
shall be the things necessary to their occupations. 
VII. That there shall be the things necessary for 
protection. VIII. That there shall be a sufficiency 
of wealth ; because from this come the three former 
necessaries " (79). 

It will be observed that the last four of 
these eight elements of the common good re- 
late primarily to man's sensual or corporeal 
wants. They were as indispensable in the so- 



A Doctrinal Deduction. 



27 



cial life of the Mohawks or Pottawottomies as 
they are in that which prevails at the most re- 
fined centres of civilization. In every com- 
munity wealth is the ultimate basis, without a 
measure of which men cannot enjoy life, the 
means of work, or safety. As this abounds 
and is diffused civilization becomes possible. 
When men have " property," or security for 
wealth, we know that some sort of civil justice 
dwells among them. The barbarian becomes 
proportionably a civilizee. The primary func- 
tion of justice is to arbitrate between meum 
and tuum ; but in the degree that its reign is 
assured it contributes to man's ascent as well 
as expansion. It looks skyward, and by means 
of it he is enabled to rise and stand with his 
feet on the civil plane on which he had been 
born prone. Now, what is just is provided 
among men through ''magistrates and judges" 
(Charity, 80), or through the " various civil 
functionaries " (84). These terms cover the 
whole province of legislature and judicature, 
the entire administration of law in behalf of 
the state and the world. Moreover, what is 
Divine is provided among men by means of 
ministers (80, 84). This symbolizes the whole 
range of the use and influence of the Church. 
Observe where we are. Upon the essential 



28 Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

substratum of " sufftcientia opum y n or wealth 
providing the necessaries for life, work, and 
safety, we have the civil plane of man's social 
life- as a foundation or ultimate, and, discreted 
from this by the distance of heaven from earth, 
we have the Divine which is provided through 
the ministry of sacred things. But the two 
planes are not continuous ; they cannot even 
coalesce. The ordering genius of the civil 
plane is the "justutn" of law, and by this the 
proper man of the world is formed. But the 
" Divinum" which makes the Church with 
man, and whose truth is the truth of sponta- 
neous, unselfish love, does not fit in directly 
with a hard, untempered, necessitous, carnal 
love of self and its civil good. The moral 
must subsist as a mediating plane of life; and 
the reader must by no means fail to make a 
note of the fact that this rational intermediate 
is derived both from the spiritual and from the 
civil. " Morality exists by means of the Di- 
vine and of what is just" (80). As man rises 
above the merely civil plane he becomes moral. 

" Through his civil good man is a man of the 
world; according to his moral good he is a man 
above the world, and lower than heaven ; and ac- 
cording to his spiritual good he is a man of heaven 
or an angel w (Char. 35). 



A Doctrinal Deduction. 29 



Now, moral good, " which is actual human 
good [ipsum bonum humannm\ for it is the 
rational good according to which man lives 
with man as a brother and companion " (33), 
becomes possessed by him only as he freely 
equilibrates between the Divine which appeals 
to him from above and the civil justice which 
naturally commands him from below. He 
forms his own ratio between that which is Di- 
vine from heaven and that which is just on 
the earth. By this rational independence he 
makes the conscious home of his personality 
in the middle region of his mind, below heaven 
and above earth — the Divine coming down to 
abide with him, and the merely civil being ex- 
alted into newness of life as a spiritual-moral 
civil. It is with the moral life that all man- 
kind, and particularly all women, are most in- 
tensely concerned while they tread the earth 
with their faces set toward heaven ; and it is 
never to be forgotten that it does not drop 
from heaven to be suspended by invisible wires 
in mid-air, but that it must be worked out by 
society's individuated parts, from the Divine 
influx of spiritual love and light on the one 
hand, and from the reflux and reaction of a 
justly ordered civil plane on the other. Free- 
dom according to reason is the conditio sine 



jo Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 



qua 11011 of God's likeness in man as the prod- 
uct of regenerate evolution, and the two planes 
of that freedom are the spiritual and the civil. 
" Divinum" and " jus turn" must ever run on 
parallel lines, or genuine morality, rationality, 
and humanity will remain unknown to the 
children of men. 



II. 



AN HISTORICAL SYNTHESIS. 
ISTORY has been referred to as showing 



that civil reforms follow private regen- 



eration. No examples have been ad- 
duced of the working of this law, but a great 
deal of* reliance has been placed on the appli- 
cation of the Lord's words, " Render unto 
Csesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto 
God the things that are God's." It has been 
inferred that these words meant that if men 
would render unto God the things that were 
God's, civil renovation would follow as a mat- 
ter of course. But let us look a little more 
intently at the lesson enforced by this interest- 
ing scene in the Gospel. Spies were sent to 
our Lord, not to learn the relation between 
civil life and spiritual life, but to "take hold 
of his words." They asked, " Is it lawful for us 
to give tribute unto Caesar, or no?" " But he 
perceived their craftiness, and said unto them, 
Why tempt ye me? Shew me a penny. 
Whose image and superscription hath it? 
They answered and said, Caesar's. And he 
said unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar 




j 2 Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

the things which be Caesar's, and unto God the 
things which be God's " (Luke xx. 19-26). 

We have here not only an answer which 
silenced caviling Churchmen at the time, but 
a statement of Divine truth of perennial ap- 
plication. Caesar's penny is the symbol of the 
truth and good of the civil order. Whatever 
one gets on the plane where civil truth bears 
rule must be paid for with the coin of this 
realm. The civil order is the mineral plane of 
necessity and its inexorable science, and he 
who would prosper here must be acquainted 
with the laws relating to natural things, and 
must be obedient to those principles which 
make for mankind's corporeal and sensuous 
welfare. The person of Caesar is nothing in 
itself. He is simply the representative of the 
civil law. He is the State. He stands for 
that in each succeeding age which dominates 
the lowest, the fixed, the self-regarding plane 
of human life, which makes one with man's 
self-love, which gives his proprium a local hab- 
itation and a name, and which constitutes the 
bony skeleton without which morality and 
spirituality would collapse, a flabby mess of 
unformed viscera. Our Lord's words are as 
emphatic an endorsement of the kingdom of 
Caesar as they are of the kingdom of God. 



An Historical Synthesis. 



33 



Caesar's kingdom is quite in order on its own 
plane, which is altogether discreted from that 
of the kingdom of heaven. Our Lord comes 
as a King, but there is no rivalry between him 
and Csesar. His kingdom is not of this world; 
while Caesar's is. Their planes are not contin- 
uous, although they are intimately related, 
and may conceivably be contiguous and cor- 
respondent at all points. But Caesar regards 
every man as necessarily a citizen of the 
world ; while the Lord regards every man as a 
possible citizen of heaven. Moreover, it is a 
law of Divine order that no man can become 
a citizen of heaven until he has first been a cit- 
izen of the world; hence Caesar is given free 
course in his own domain. 

It has been affirmed that it is significant 
that our Lord did not preach " the overthrow 
of Caesar." It is difficult to conjecture why, 
under any theory of reform, He should have 
done so, for only a servant of Caesar would 
have dared to crown his cross with the ac- 
knowledgment that He was indubitably Rex 
Judceornm. We are told that the Lord came 
to effect man's redemption, and that He was 
especially intent on saving the people from 
their sins ; but it is never to be forgotten that 
He did not come until He had prepared the 

3 



24- Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

world for his advent. He came only in "the 
fullness of time." It is no doubt true that 
when our Lord came into the world, it was in 
the worst possible condition as regards the 
spiritual and spiritual-moral planes of human 
life ; but that the civil order — which is strictly 
the plane of natural reforms — was in a worse 
condition than previously, is an unwarranted 
assumption. No doubt the civil state of the 
world was more unscientific and less perfect 
than it is to-day ; but, on the other hand, it 
was unquestionably more scientific and perfect 
than at any preceding period of known his- 
tory. It is absurd to predicate a spiritual bet- 
ter or worse of the civil order per se. Regard- 
ed in itself, it is essentially self-loving and 
world-loving. It can be better or worse only 
in the sense that superior or inferior degrees 
of physical and political science are generally 
understood and practically applied. Civil 
progress is commensurate with society's ap- 
preciation of its own natural interests. The 
laws of civil advancement work on unremit- 
tingly, quite without concern for the rise or 
fall of the spiritual order. The actors who 
were conspicuous in far-reaching transforma- 
tions in things civil at the time of our Lord's 
advent, performed their parts most efficiently 



An Historical Synthesis. 



without ever having heard that Jesus was born 
in Bethlehem of Judaea. 

We cannot be too strenuous in drawing an 
impassable line of demarkation between the 
civil per se and the spiritual per se. Sweden- 
borg has made it a maxim for us that no one 
can really understand any subject unless he 
has a knowledge of degrees ; and this is em- 
phatically true of sociology. If we bear in 
mind that Csesar stands for the civil order as 
the basic plane of human life on earth, we 
shall be able to comprehend something of the 
meaning of our Lord's words when He says, 
" Render unto Csesar the things that are Cae- 
sar's. " He needed no one to give Him infor- 
mation on this point, for He knew what was in 
Caesar as well as in other men; and He who 
foretold the desolation of Jerusalem also knew 
perfectly well the mission of that Empire 
which should destroy it. He knew what Cae- 
sar signified for Him and his kingdom. Caesar 
represented a state of the world that had been 
long preparing for a Divine advent. " Caesar 
.stood for the Roman State, which to the imag- 
ination of the people of those days was cotermi- 
nous with " all the world." Had the old political 
order still obtained, and a king of David's line 
ruled absolutely in Judaea when Messiah came, 



j6 Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

it would have been equally disastrous- whether 
his nation had accepted or rejected Him. 
Had He been accepted, the revelation He 
made would have fallen into the old, natural 
idea of the Hebrews, and Jesus would have 
been only a nationalized Jew-God, as Jehovah 
had been under the old dispensation. Had 
He been rejected by the Jews, it would have 
been fatal to his Gospel, because the civil or- 
der of the Gentiles would not have been pre- 
pared to receive and house his Church. But 
Caesar stood to our Lord for a civil order which 
pacified and unified men of all nations and re- 
ligions and languages, and his supremacy 
meant that it was a feasible thing to bring 
down from heaven a Gospel that was not for 
Jew only, but for all mankind. No one who 
has studied with any capacity the subsequent 
development of history, can have failed to ad- 
mire the grandeur of that Providential skill 
which utilized the civil order of the Roman 
Empire as the mould in which to cast the first 
Christian Church. 

Caesar stood for the Roman road, the sym- 
bol of universality. To those who constructed 
them the roads were mainly a convenience of 
war, facilitating the hurling of the legions to 
the ends of the earth. But to our Lord's dis- 



An Historical Synthesis. 



ciples they became a prepared highway by 
which they could go to all nations, the ambas- 
sadors and soldiers of Him who is the Prince 
of Peace. 

Caesar stood for the universal presence of 
the majestic Roman law. From the first that 
law was an august protection to the disciples 
from sectional prejudices and every kind of lo- 
cal ecclesiastical lust. The great apostle to 
the Gentiles was a Roman citizen, and could 
appeal to Caesar. As time went on Caesar 
meant more and more of protection to the 
Church, until she waxed so great that, when the 
Empire in Europe was overwhelmed by Teu- 
ton hordes, this imperium in imperio continued 
as vigorous as before, and by means of the 
municipal idea, the Roman law, the Roman 
tongue, and the Roman principle of universal- 
ity, became the actual tamer and trainer of 
barbarians. Not only did the Church preserve 
the oracles of God and the Christian sacra- 
ments, but throughout the Middle Ages she 
was also the conservator of learning and of the 
saving elements of social life. 

Caesar stood for the destruction of Greek 
political independence, and the consequent 
dispersion of the Greek language and Greek 
thought throughout the world. Hence it was 



j8 Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

possible for the Gospel to be crystallized in a 
universal language that was associated in 
men's minds with the most free, the most 
beautiful, and the most philosophical ideals of 
the human intellect. And anticipating our 
argument, it may be said in this connection 
that Caesar also stood for the propagation and 
perpetuation of the rugged, comprehensive, 
and masterful Latin language — the language 
of scientific warfare and systematic govern- 
ment. In the hands of the practical Romans 
it never lent itself to deep philosophy or great 
originality, but in the Middle Ages it became 
the scholastic and theological language of 
Europe, and when the spirit of modern inves- 
tigation asserted itself, it was adopted as the 
vehicle of science. And so, when time was 
ripe, it was found the fit and prepared medi- 
um of a revelation relating at once to the 
earthly and heavenly planes of correspon- 
dence. When the rapturous and soul-satisfy- 
ing truths of angelic wisdom were elaborated 
with philosophic clearness and scientific exact- 
ness in the natural, worldly, and assertive lan- 
guage of Caesar, then surely first and last 
things met together, and it came to pass that 
the tabernacle of God was set up among men. 
The genius of Rome was the genius of un- 



An Historical Synthesis. jp 



mitigated selfishness; yet the rise and prog- 
ress of Rome meant civil advancement for 
mankind at large. The coming of the legions 
foreshadowed law and order, manners and let- 
ters, and, despite occasional persecutions, con- 
ditions in which the Gospel could thrive. 
Here as always we find the Lord preparing 
the civil order for the reception of the spirit- 
ual order. Long before his advent the forces 
were set in motion which prepared the way 
for his coming and the world-wide establish- 
ment of his Church as interpreted according 
to the letter of the Gospel; and, directed by 
immediate influx, those forces worked on for 
centuries after his advent with slight direct re- 
gard for the heavenly principles revealed to 
the consciousness of those who became volun- 
tary subjects of his own Divine kingdom. 

The Empire served the Providential pur- 
pose of Him who has ever in view a heaven of 
angels from the human race. But, although 
the Roman political order was more perfect 
than any that preceded it, it was not the most 
perfect of which men were capable. It was 
inadequate to the exigencies of the New Eu- 
rope. It could not provide in scientific ways 
for that sufficiency of wealth by which all 
could obtain the necessaries of life, work, and 



4<D Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

safety ; lacking the principle of representative 
government, it was incapable of giving the 
new nations liberty compatible with order. 
Wherefore it passed aw T ay. 

The feudal and royal systems which fol- 
lowed, expressive of the sentiment of mutual 
responsibility between governors and the gov- 
erned, so housed the Christian religion that 
men were able, from the Divine from above 
and the just from below, to evolve a new mor- 
al order which gave woman and the home, 
honorable ambition and self-sacrifice, a mean- 
ing that was undreamed of by the pre-Christ- 
ian Romans. Still, the civil basis was not 
broad enough or stable enough to warrant or 
make possible our Lord's second advent. 

For how did our Lord come the second 
time? Did He come regardless of the condi- 
tion of the world into which He was to make 
his spiritual advent? Did He come and re- 
generate men, and depend on them to provide 
the necessary civil plane for his New Church ? 
He proceeded, as ever, according to the meth- 
ods of his own Divine order, and first got 
ready the foundation of the temple He was 
about to build. In his Divine Providence He 
so ordered the affairs of men that all the mate- 
rials should be on hand for his work. He first 



An Historical Synthesis. 



I 1 



prepared the civil plane, and He did this 
through and by means of man's ever-present 
love of self and love of the world. 

The internal sense of the Word and a true 
spiritual philosophy could never have been 
given to the world without the enlarged and 
rectified knowledge of nature incident to the 
modern study of the external universe. The 
wisdom of the ancients and mediaeval science 
were quite insufficient to give a locti-s standi to 
the truths of the New Church. A Copernican 
theology could never be based on a geocentric 
astronomy. Swedenborg would have had no 
vocabulary with which to translate the angelic 
idea of the Lord as a sun, and of man as an 
earthly proprinm, unless the new astronomy 
had found acceptance among men. The re- 
form in astronomy inaugurated a reform in all 
the sciences. When we think of the great 
names of Newton and Harvey, Boerhaave and 
Swammerdam, and a host of other scholars in 
one or other of the kingdoms of nature, we 
cannot but regard them as the unconscious 
Providential harbingers of the second coming. 
Animated by their native loves, they were ac- 
quiring for mankind a vast mass of materials 
necessary for the interpretation, illustration, 
and corroboration of the truths of the new dis- 



42 Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

pensation. First that which is natural, then 
that which is spiritual. Under Providence the 
men of science were busy discovering new 
scientific bottles to hold the new wine of spir- 
itual truth about to be given. 

Another event preparatory to the new spir- 
itual order was the invention of printing. 
Swedenborg affirms that the principal reason 
why the Lord was born upon our earth was 
that the Word could be written and published 
here, and preserved to all posterity, 

" That the Word might be written on our earth, 
is in consequence of the art of writing having ex- 
isted here from the most ancient times, first on the 
rind or bark of trees, next on skins or parchment, 
afterward on paper, and lastly by types as in print- 
ing. This was provided of the Lord for the sake of 
the Word " (E. U. 115). 

Here, in the sensuous ultimate of Maximus 
Homo, the Word is capable of being written, 
widely distributed, and lastingly preserved. 
And when we reflect that the second advent 
is distinctively a dispensation of the spiritual 
sense of the Word, and that the spiritual sense 
resides in the letter as in its firmament, basis, 
and containant, we can appreciate how all-im- 
portant it was that the Word should be popu- 
larly known among those who were first to 



An Historical Synthesis. 4.3 



hear the truths of the New Church. This 
popularization and common possession of the 
Word could be made practicable only by 
means of the rapid and inexpensive reproduc- 
tion of books. This was accomplished by the 
invention of movable types and the printing- 
press, which in the hands of the Reformers 
soon made the Law and the Gospel familiar as 
household words among the peoples of North- 
western Europe. Whatever estimate we may 
place on the Reformation as a means of gen- 
uine spiritual enlightenment at the time, there 
can be no question that on the natural plane 
it effected changes without which the second 
advent would have been impossible. It could 
give men no new light, but it did set them to 
thinking in the light they had, and achieved 
for their benefit the multiplication, distribution, 
and perpetuation of editions of the letter of 
the Scriptures. 

One of the greatest reforms that paved the 
way for the second advent, was the changed 
character of war as the result of the invention 
of gunpowder and the development of the sci- 
ence of military engineering. In the Middle 
Ages war was the common business of almost 
all free able-bodied men. The result was that 
letters could flourish only in the monasteries, 



^ Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

and commerce languished in contempt. Gun- 
powder and military science made war so ex- 
pensive a luxury that it could not be indulged 
in to any extent by private gentlemen and 
their retainers, and so complicated that it re- 
quired a trained class to carry it on with effi- 
ciency. Hence it passed out of the hands of 
the laity and became the specific business of 
the army. While military work was thus 
much more efficiently performed, it left the 
great mass of the people in the most advanced 
nations of Europe free to pursue agriculture, 
manufactures, and commerce in such a way as 
to lay a broad and deep and permanent foun- 
dation for intellectual development, and estab- 
lish social and moral conditions in which the 
spiritually inclined might pursue the Divine 
and heavenly in peace. 

Our age is often called the age of steam. 
Marvelous is the transformation that has been 
wrought by this agency. But in this connec- 
tion it is important to remember that the 
steam-engine was invented long before the 
Last Judgment. It is true that James Watt 
did not effect his improvements until the latter 
half of the eighteenth century, but the prin- 
ciple of steam power was well known in the 
preceding century. A steam-engine was pat- 



An Historical Synthesis. 



45 



ented in England when Swedenborg was a boy 
of ten. Coal had long been used as fuel, and 
before the end of the seventeenth century 
Great Britain had begun that remarkable ca- 
reer of commercial prosperity that has kept 
pace with all changes to the present time. 
Epochs in commerce and natural development 
are not marked or determined by spiritual rev- 
olutions or judgments. Scientific and business 
advancement is seen to come by steps which 
closely follow each other in a logical order of 
their own. Before his second advent the Lord 
laid the foundations of a commercial system 
which should prove equal to the necessities of 
the establishment of a new spiritual earth in 
league with a new spiritual heaven. 

Many other points might be insisted on as 
confirming this position, but I must content my- 
self with noting only one more prerequisite — 
and that an indispensable one — to the second 
advent. The most careless of Swedenborg's 
readers has noticed that his books were origi- 
nally published in London or Amsterdam. 
This is a most significant fact. Had Sweden- 
borg been born a century earlier, and had he 
attempted to publish the " Arcana Coelestia ,, 
in London, it probably would have been burnt 
by the common hangman, while its author lan- 



q.6 Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 



guished in a filthy prison. But the very year 
he was born an event occurred that was big 
with benefits for freedom and conscience, for 
rational inquiry and spiritual capacity. The 
champion of European Protestantism accepted 
the crown of England. The landing of the 
Prince of Orange inaugurated the constitu- 
tional supremacy of the House of Commons, 
which has identified the interests of the Brit- 
ish Government with the welfare of the British 
people, and it so cemented the relations of 
England and Holland that as King of England 
the Prince of Orange was able to head the co- 
alition against France with such effectiveness 
as to render its tyrannical ruler no longer ca- 
pable of dictating the liberties of Europe. 
It secured Protestant ascendency, and the pos- 
sibility of free government. Great Britain, by 
her internal and external relations, became 
permanently committed to the theory of civil 
and religious liberty. It took a good while 
for all the fruits of this change to be realized. 
Some of them were not ripe until within the 
memory of men still living. But one effect 
was very speedily felt. In 1695 the law which 
provided for the censorship of the press came 
to an end, and was never renewed. This neg- 
ative reform — a mere failure to re-enact a bad 



An Historical Synthesis. ^7 



law — brought English civilization at that point 
up to the level of that of Holland, and pro- 
duced effects which can hardly be overesti- 
mated as a preparation for the second advent. 
Not to speak of the rapid multiplication and 
improvement of books and newspapers, by 
which knowledge was increased and a reading 
public created, the liberation of the press pro- 
vided a free channel for the flow of new ideas, 
and an atmosphere in which the mind became 
habituated to looking at many things in many 
lights. Without let or hinderance the truths 
of the New Church got published in Holland 
and England. In what other European coun- 
try could they have been printed with any cer- 
tainty of protection ? In what preceding age 
could they have possibly been written ? 

I think that the facts I have adduced show 
that the reformed conditions which were essen- 
tial concomitants of the new dispensation were 
provided beforehand by the Lord, and that his 
power was not limited by a disposition to be 
regenerated on the part of any man or any 
set of men. 



Ill 



THE UTILITARIAN VALUE OF SELF- 



HE notion that reforms in the civil order 



are the result of " individual regeneration 



making itself felt as fast as it becomes 
general in the body politic," seems to be an 
attempt to antagonize the theory that private 
internal regeneration must follow as the effect 
of public external reformation; for it is assert- 
ed again and again with all gravity that all 
genuine reforms will follow as a matter of 
course when people are saved from their sins, 
and not vice versa. But surely, if there are 
any who contend that public reforms will pro- 
duce private regeneration, the fallacy can be 
exposed without running into an opposite and 
equally illogical heresy. All that is required 
is sufficient imagination to perceive that two 
things may possibly bear some other relation 
to one another than that of cause and effect. 

To say that of two things the one is pre- 
requisite to the other, is quite a different prop- 
osition from saying that it is the efficient cause 
of that other. Our Lord's victories over the 



LOVE. 




Utilitarian Value of Self-Love. 49 

hells were not the cause of the glorification of 
his humanity, although they were an essential 
and prerequisite means to it. The cause of 
that glorification was the descent of his divin- 
ity to complete union with his humanity. The 
cause of a man's regeneration is not his shun- 
ning of evils as sins against God, though this 
must precede it. The cause of his regenera- 
tion is the influx of the Lord's good into the 
truths previously provided and adopted. The 
cause of our Lord's advent in the flesh was not 
the natural events which preceded it, although 
these were necessary preparations to make 
his coming effective. The efficient cause was 
his eternal love of redeeming which must fol- 
low man to all lengths in his spiritual descent. 
The cause of the second advent in the power 
and glory of the Word was not modern sci- 
ence, or the printing-press, or the building up 
of commerce, or civil security incident to the 
growth of the art of war, or the Reformation, 
or the freedom of the press, or the constitu- 
tional liberty of Holland and England, albeit 
these were important prerequisite conditions 
or means for making that advent effective. 
The cause of that spiritual appearing with its 
consequent changes was the approach and ac- 
tivity of our Lord's Divine Humanity, not to 

4 



50 Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

effect any external transformation, but to save 
in a new and full sense his heaven and his 
Church. 

Regarded in itself, the civil order, with its 
formations and re-formations, is not only not 
the effect of the individual regeneration of the 
men who are upon the earth at any particular 
time, but it is not even the effect of the ag- 
gregate regeneration of the Church and of 
heaven. Can any thoughtful and well-informed 
man for one moment suppose that the Lord 
would postpone the provision of means for the 
production of fruit until that fruit had ripened? 
Why do we write on social themes without 
studying the bearing of our doctrines upon 
them? Do we suppose that man is not the 
subject of that immediate influx which creates 
the physical kingdoms of nature through the 
agency of a dead sun? Have we never heard 
of that common influx from the spiritual world 
which gifts all animals — whether brute or hu- 
man — with instinct? (And it must never be 
forgotten that civil good per se is first and last 
only an animal good.) Have we never learned 
that, however important mediate influx be-* 
comes to us after we begin to be regenerated, 
it is of little consequence so far as we are con- 
cerned until we voluntarily acquire truths for 



Utilitarian Value of Self-Love, ji 



ourselves as means of conjunction with good? 
Moreover, no mediate influx is ever allowed 
without an accompanying influx that is imme- 
diate, and on every plane of the human mind 
that which is accomplished by means of medi- 
ate influx is inconspicuous in comparison with 
what the Lord does from himself by immedi- 
ate influx. This is peculiarly true of the civil 
plane, which on its sensuous side is strictly 
saved from the organic moral perversions of 
mankind. However perverse man's affections 
and thoughts may be, when they come out in 
actions and speech they fall into order, and the 
worst man speaks and acts by precisely those 
means and laws which must be utilized by the 
angel when he has to operate on the same 
plane. The difference does not lie at all in the 
outward form, but solely in the inward quality. 
What is true of our individual persons, in re- 
lation to our corporeal and civil life, is univer- 
sally true of the relations between mankind as 
morally and spiritually constituted and man- 
kind as constituted naturally and civilly. The 
great laws of the civil order work on from age 
to age, with scant respect for either the antics 
of devils or the aspirations of angels. Our 
private regeneration has about as much effect 
on the course of the stream of Providence in 



52 Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

civil affairs as the love-song of a Harvard un- 
dergraduate has on the meandering current of 
the Charles River as he sculls his canoe in the 
shimmering moonlight. If ever it come to 
pass in peace or war that the undergraduate 
be called upon to change the flow of the wat- 
er, he will have to make the acquaintance of 
pickaxe and spade, diving-bell and dynamite, 
and get down and deal with the channel ac- 
cording to its own nature and on its own 
terms. 

We have been assured that as a result of 
"the baptism of repentance for the remission 
of sin," there will come a new adjustment of 
men's civic and economic relations, and this 
we are told is for the simple and obvious rea- 
son that the former includes the latter. The 
force of this logic is not so obvious to me as it 
might be. Those who write in this vein seem 
to imagine that what is included follows as an 
effect after that which is greater and includes 
it has been realized. It naturally occurs to 
one to inquire why the lesser and included 
thing should ever come to fruition at all, if the 
greater thing which includes it can get along 
so well without it. The thoughtful mind ha- 
bitually supposes that everything included in a 
greater is, if not indispensable, at least impor- 



Utilitarian Value of Self-Love. $j 



tant to the make-up or growth of that greater. 
It is in this way that Swedenborg treats of all 
things " involved and included." Reverting 
to "True Christian Religion," 152, already 
quoted, we see that all the materials of a house 
and the processes of its construction are said 
to be included or to dwell together {insimul 
insunt) in the end proposed, " a commodious 
habitation." "The end proposed supplies it- 
self with all needful means for its accomplish- 
ment." This is a universal law. The lesser 
thing included in a greater is a means for its 
accomplishment. The final end of anything 
is its fruit or use. Of course, this end or use 
must exist primarily as an ideal aim or end. 
Thus as a primal end it precedes in thought 
and purpose, and includes all that follows as 
means to the eventual realization of the end in 
use. But no one would ever think of saying, 
Let us realize our ideal end, assured that, be- 
cause the greater includes the less, and the end 
involves and includes the means, if we can give 
actuality to the end, the means will follow as a 
matter of course. The end of creation is a 
heaven of angels from the human race. But, 
because that involves a physical universe and 
the historic natural man, how childish would it 
be to suppose that the Lord could create a 



54. Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

heaven of angels, and then as a result of that 
count on the world of matter and of history 
following as a matter of course. Without the 
lesser, included things no angel would ever 
come into existence to tread the courts of 
heaven. Likewise, the regeneration of the 
soul is the final end of all God's Providence in 
reference to the individual. But, because sen- 
suous and corporeal, scientific and civil, ration- 
al and moral development is included in spirit- 
ual regeneration, shall we say, Let us first get 
the regenerate mind and heart, and depend on 
the lesser things of morality and science and 
common sense following as a matter of course? 
This would be precisely like a horticulturist 
who should desire an orchard bearing annual 
crops of apples, and who should seek to gain 
his end by acquiring the fruit at the first in- 
stead of at the last, depending on lesser, in- 
cluded things following as a matter of course. 
As though the apples could reverse the proc- 
ess, and evolve from themselves buds and blos- 
soms, leaves and twigs, limbs and trunk, roots 
and soil ; yet all these things are involved and 
included in the end, which is the Greenings or 
Winesaps that bring their measure of wealth 
to the grower. 

Again, we have been assured that no 



Utilitarian Value of Self-Love. 55 



amount of reform movements or of external 
organization can heal the evils of the time, 
unless we have the right kind of men to give 
them efficacy, and that such men cannot be 
produced except as the outgrowth of the 
teaching and influence of the Church, nay, 
more, that the latter includes the former, on 
the principle that the greater includes the less, 
and that if the Church can convert men and 
make them true followers of the Master, all 
the rest will follow as a matter of course. 
Any one who reflects for a moment on the tre- 
mendous meaning of this little word "if" will 
see that the Divine Providence cannot, in the 
nature of the case, depend on those who will 
to be saved for the execution of universal pur- 
poses on the external planes of creation. But 
entirely apart from this truth we have clear 
doctrine on the subject of men as instruments 
of the Lord's Providence. 

No doubt it is true that we need "the right 
sort of men" to administer reform processes, 
and to control civil or social organizations. 
But it would be a vast misfortune if we had to 
hunt for converted and saved men to func- 
tionate these uses. We have no capaci- 
ty for telling a converted man when we see 
him. 



j6 Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform, 

" A man is never allowed to judge concerning 
another as to the quality of his spiritual life ; for the 
Lord alone knows this. But every one is allowed to 
judge concerning another as to his quality as to mor- 
al and civil life ; for this is of importance to societv " 
(A. C. 2284). 

The fact of the matter is that on the civil 
plane it is none of Society's business whether 
useful men are converted or not; and, inas- 
much as we cannot know whether they are 
regenerated or not, if regeneration were an in- 
dispensable qualification to fit them for their 
functions, it would certainly work many unde- 
sirable changes in the present order of our as- 
sociate life, not the least of which would be 
the destruction of representative government, 
for of the internal states of candidates no vot- 
er could ever judge. The inevitable result of 
setting up a spiritual standard in civil life 
would be again, as it has always been hitherto, 
to produce shoals of hypocrites. Surely we 
have learned, from the history alike of Popery 
and Puritanism, to avoid even in desire a repe- 
tition of such mixing of discreted planes. 
The " right kind of man" to engineer civil 
affairs is not a saint, or the man who walks a 
straight line on the spiritual plane, but the man 
who has the necessary scientific information, 
the energetic capacity, the diplomatic address, 



Utilitarian Value of Self-Love. 57 



and the professional integrity which are cur- 
rent coin on the civil plane. Of course, when 
I speak of professional integrity I am not re- 
ferring to any regenerate or internal virtue. 
It is that element of pride, or vanity, or self- 
respect in man which leads good and evil alike 
to hold themselves superior to cheap tempta- 
tions, and to refuse to sell themselves at a low 
estimate. This begets a politic honesty in the 
performance of duties. It may be true that 
most unregenerate men " have their price," 
but the more scientific the civilization the 
higher is the average price, which means that 
the public service in every department is by so 
much the more certain to be administered ac- 
cording to enlightened public opinion and 
common justice. Not only do the controlling 
love of self and love of the world not incapac- 
itate men for administering civil and moral 
functions, but under many circumstances they 
may be prime qualifications for political and 
military and scientific usefulness. How true 
this is in the case of the army is shown in 
" Divine Providence," 252: 

"That it makes no difference whether the com- 
mander is an upright man or not, is for the reason 
that was confirmed above, namely, that the wicked 
equally with the good do uses, and the evil from their 



j8 Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 



fire with more ardor than the good, especially in 
wars, because the evil man is more crafty and shrewd 
in contriving snares," etc. 

In all departments of life purely worldly 
progress is safest irr the hands of men who 
have a very keen sense of the value of wealth 
and position. The native loves of men are 
not to be boycotted, but utilized. The right 
kind of men " to run the machine " of civil 
life does not mean those who are regenerate 
(although, other things being equal, there is 
no objection to these), but it is rather men who 
know how to guide and control public affairs 
for the general good plus their own aggran- 
dizement. We need not inquire whether their 
motives are angelic or diabolic, but it must be 
known that they are operating scientifically 
and fruitfully, or according to order, and that 
their personal aggrandizement does not imperil 
or impoverish the public good. 

" Now something shall be said concerning the 
Divine Providence, as to why it permits the impious 
in heart to be raised to dignities and enriched with 
wealth. The impious or wicked can perform uses 
equally with the pious or good; yes, with greater 
fire, for in the uses they regard themselves, and the 
honors as the uses ; therefore, to whatever height the 
love of self climbs, the lust of doing uses for the 
sake of its own glory is there set on fire. There is 



Utilitarian Value of Self- Love. 59 



not such fire with the pious or good, unless kindled 
below by some honor. Wherefore, the Lord governs 
the impious in heart who are in positions of dignity, 
by the celebrity of their name, and incites them to 
do uses to the public or their country, to the society 
or city in which they dwell, and also to their fellow- 
citizen or neighbor with whom they are. With such, 
this is the Lord's government which is called the Di- 
vine Providence ; for the Lord's kingdom is a king- 
dom of uses ; and where there are but few who per- 
form uses for the sake of uses, He causes the wor- 
shipers of self to be raised to the higher offices, in 
which each one is incited to do good through his 
love. . . . Since, therefore, they are so few who 
are loves of God, and they so many who are loves 
of self and the world, and since the latter from their 
fire perform uses more than the loves of God from 
theirs, how then can anyone confirm himself [against 
the Divine Providence] by the fact that the evil are 
in eminence and opulence above the good?" (D. P. 
250). 

Moreover, to be a spiritual or regenerated 
man does not mean to be something different 
on the civil plane from the purely natural 
man; it means to be something more on a 
higher plane. Every man is created to be a 
civil and moral man, and he can be a spiritual 
man only in the measure that he has previously 
been civil and moral. 

" He is called a civil man who knows the laws of 
the kingdom wherein he is a citizen, and lives ac- 
cording to them ; and he is called a moral man who 



6o Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 



makes these laws his morals and his virtues, and from 
reason lives them. I will now tell how a civil and 
moral life is the receptacle of spiritual life : Live 
these laws, not only as civil and moral laws, but also 
as Divine laws, and you will be a spiritual man" 
(D. P. 322). 

The more correctly civil and moral laws 
answer to the Divine order, the more perfect 
is the individual consciousness moulded by 
those laws as a vessel to receive heavenly life. 
The individual's regeneration is conditioned 
by so much of the civil and moral life as he 
makes his own of that general order into which 
he is born, and in which he lives and moves 
and has his outward being; and of course 
what he can make his own is regulated by the 
character of that general order which over- 
shadows and envelops him from the cradle to 
the grave. The civil order cannot be regener- 
ated in itself, because it belongs to the spirit- 
ually evil as certainly as to the spiritually 
good ; but, retaining its own motive and ani- 
mus in regard to the good of its own plane, it 
may be brought into correspondence and self- 
regarding obedience to the order which ob- 
tains in heaven. And this is all that can ever 
be logically expected from the most perfect 
civil life on earth — that it shall not dwarf, or 



Utilitarian Value of Self-Love. 61 



stifle, or stultify the possible spiritual life 
which men may desire to pursue and enjoy 
while abiding on the natural plane. Each re- 
generate man is qiiite competent for himself, 
if he have thus the chance, to fill his own civil 
life full of the spirit of heavenly loves. 



IV. 

THE MODIFICATION OF THE SPIRIT- 
UAL BY THE NATURAL. 

IT must not be supposed that external condi- 
tions have no permanent effect in modify- 
ing the reception of spiritual life. It is 
true that the Lord sees to it that every man 
may be saved from hell if he will, in spite of 
the most adverse environment; but getting 
into heaven is only a small part of salvation. 
The possibilities of regenerate perception, 
fellowship, delight, and helpful activity are 
boundless, and it is not too much to say that 
these possibilities are very seriously and irre- 
trievably handicapped by the external circum- 
stances in which men spend their earthly lives. 
We have clear teaching on the subject. In 
"True Christian Religion," 807, we read: 

" With respect to the people of England, the bet- 
ter sort among them are in the centre of all Christ- 
ians, in consequence of possessing an interior intel- 
lectual light. This, though it is not apparent to any 
one in the natural world, is very conspicuous in the 
spiritual world. They derive this light from the lib- 
erty of speaking and writing, and thence of thinking; 
while others who do not enjoy such liberty have that 



The Natural Modifies the Spiritual. 63 



light presented in a confused manner, because it 
lacks an outlet." 

And in "True Christian Religion," 814, 
815, 816, we read : 

" As the Germans in each particular dukedom 
live under a despotic government, they do not en- 
joy the liberty of speaking and writing like the Dutch 
and English ; and where the liberty of speaking and 
writing is restrained, the liberty of thinking, that is, 
of taking an enlarged view of things, is under re- 
straint at the same time. For this case is like that 
of the basin of a fountain, whose sides are so high 
that the water within is elevated even to the summit 
of the salient stream, so that it no longer forms a jet. 
According to this comparison, thought is like the sa- 
lient stream, and speech proceeding thence is like 
the basin ; in a word, influx always adapts itself to 
efflux, and so does the understanding from the supe- 
rior region of the mind adapt itself to the measure 
of liberty allowed for uttering and giving vent to the 
thoughts. ... In consequence of this their state 
they keep the spiritual subjects of the Church in- 
scribed on their memories, and seldom elevate them 
into the superior region of the understanding, but 
admit them only into the inferior region, and thence 
reason upon them, in which practice they differ en- 
tirely from free nations ; for these, in regard to the 
spiritual subjects of the Church, which are compre- 
hended under the name of theology, are like eagles 
which raise themselves to any height in the atmos- 
phere, whereas nations that are not free are like 
swans in a river. . . . According to the state of 
a man's mind in the natural world, such also is its 
state in the spiritual world." 



6^ Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

How true it is that influx is according to 
efflux may be seen when we reflect on the his- 
tory of the New Church on the continent of 
Europe. In Great Britain and America, when 
we think of the New Church, the mind calls 
up the vision of thousands of individual re- 
ceivers of the truths of the new dispensation 
freely organizing in various ways for the ac- 
complishment of uses. In the countries on 
the Continent we can think only of names of 
individuals and a few struggling circles. Un- 
der Providence, some faithful souls have been 
found to hold aloft the banner of light; but 
even the illustrious pioneers in France, Italy, 
Germany, and other countries, largely sus- 
tained by the moral and financial backing of 
Churchmen breathing the free air of England 
and the United States, have been for the most 
part men whose talents fitted them more for 
the indispensable and preparatory work of 
translating and publishing the doctrines, than 
for expounding and illustrating their heavenly 
philosophy. But when the inhabitants of these 
countries merge their political life in that of 
"free nations" they become no less receptive 
than others of spiritual enlightenment. There 
are no more zealous, intelligent, and affection- 
ate New-Churchmen in the world than scores 



The Natural Modifies the Spiritual. 65 



of the Germans who have emigrated to Amer- 
ica for the sake of larger opportunities and a 
wider liberty. The breezes that float the 
Stars and Stripes are congenial to the spread 
of angelic ideas concerning the Divine love 
and wisdom. 

From all the facts and reasons we have 
considered the conclusion is unavoidable, that 
reformed conditions must precede the orderly 
influx of spiritual life, and that to the extent 
that men would affect or improve the strictly 
civil or basic plane of society, they must reck- 
on on those loves of self and the world which 
are germane to the lowest degree of life. If 
any doubt remains in the reader's mind of the 
direct antithesis which subsists between the 
spiritual order and the civil order, and if he 
persists in the notion that the relation of cause 
and effect is maintained between the regener- 
ate life of the Church and the civil form of the 
nation, let him digest Swedenborg's plain dec- 
laration that so stupendous an event as the 
Last Judgment, involving as it did a work of 
redemption which a second time subjugated 
the hells, reorganized heaven, and established 
a New Church upon the earth, had absolutely 
no effect on the natural current of civil his- 
tory. 

5 



66 Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

" The state of the world hereafter will be quite 
similar to what it has been heretofore, for the great 
change which has been effected in the spiritual world 
does not induce any change in the natural world as 
regards the outward form. So that the affairs of 
states, peace, treaties, and wars, with all other things 
which belong to societies of men, in general and 
in particular, will exist in the future just as they ex- 
isted in the past. . . . But as for the state of 
the Church, this it is which will be dissimilar here- 
after » (L.J. 73). 

Of course, Swedenborg did not mean to 
say that the nineteenth century would be an 
exact reproduction of the eighteenth, any 
more than he would have declared that the 
England of his own times was exactly like the 
England of the Stuarts or the Tudors. That 
would have been an absurdity contradicted by 
all the facts. But what he did mean to say 
was that the civil order works on persistently 
in obedience to its immediate or proximate 
end, which is to conciliate man's natural loves 
and to supply his natural wants, and that a 
great internal change, either in an individual 
man or in a vast heaven or hell, does not make 
a break in the concatenated chain of cause 
and effect in the evolution of history. In 
" Divine Providence," 252, we read of a natu- 
ral justice in the world, which, Swedenborg af- 
firms, is quite a different thing from spiritual 



The Natural Modifies the Spiritual. 



67 



justice in heaven, and it is said that they are 
conjoined only " by means of the connection 
between things past and things future which 
are known only to the Lord." The present is 
the natural progeny of the past. Changes 
which took place centuries ago may be more 
influential and beneficial to-day than ever be- 
fore. Great upheavals and reconstructions 
are not the result of events that occurred in 
the immediate yesterday. In the dumb des- 
peration of rural France as far back as the 
days of Louis XIV., we feel the cumulative 
silence that presaged the storm-burst of the 
Revolution. When the republicanism of Hol- 
land passed like iron into the blood of the 
Puritans, it made the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence a necessary consequent as sure as the 
Mayflower should weather the storm and land 
the Pilgrim Fathers on the shore of a virgin 
land of opportunities. 

What spiritual advantages men enjoy at the 
present day are insured to them and their chil- 
dren by the comparative conformity to law and 
order under existent institutions. The external 
measurably lends itself to the service of internal 
ends. The civil and the moral in some degree 
provide a tabernacle for the heavenly. What- 
ever expansion of spiritual freedom, apprecia- 



68 Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

tion, and capacity we may expect in the future 
will be strictly contingent on improved and 
improving outer conditions. It is true that 
the state of the world at the present time is 
favorable to the existence of a spiritual Church 
among the few, but among very few outside of 
English-speaking nations. The moral and civil 
environment of the vast majority of mankind 
is an insuperable hinderance to that dispersion 
of false notions and traditional superstitions 
which is an indispensable precursor of the 
establishment of the Church among many. 
And, even in the freest country under heaven, 
much still remains to be done in the legislating 
of just laws and their scientific and painstaking 
administration, before the Divine Providence, 
working by immediate influx and the continu- 
ity of history, shall have evolved a competent 
sense (albeit a thoroughly selfish sense) of jus- 
tice on the natural plane, which may answer in 
inverted correspondence to that Divinum which 
is now among us by heavenly doctrine, and 
from the contiguity and co-operation of which 
there shall subsist a divinely-human society as 
a moral intermediate, in which the natural 
woman can so comport herself as to be the 
living, breathing expression of the prolific 
Church of God. For it is the condition of 



The Natural Modifies the Spiritual. 6p 

woman that is the token at once of a nation's 
spiritual status and of the serviceableness of 
its civil institutions. Heaven be praised ! 
much has been done, but there is more to 
follow. Let no man dream, because the day 
of general judgments has gone by, and there 
is now no impassable Styx between heaven 
and earth, that the Lord has his hands tied by 
the limited good of heaven or the perverted 
good of hell. He makes abundant use of 
both for the benefit of mankind; but by his 
Divine Humanity He continues to work imme- 
diately for the race, and what He does by me- 
diate influx counts for but little in comparison 
with what He does by the might of his own 
right arm. He operates from first principles 
through ultimates for the preparation, co-ordi- 
nation, reformation, and where possible the 
regeneration of intermediates. He who is the 
First and the Last asks no man's leave to 
work, and is dependent on no man's regenera- 
tion for the accomplishment of his Divine de- 
signs. He has his hook in the nose of Levia- 
than, and leads him whithersoever He will. 
By the redemption which He is forever effect- 
ing, He is setting the hells in order, He is 
bringing the heavens to greater perfection, and 
is forming a new Church on the earth. That 



yo Spiritual Philosophy of Natural Reform. 

redemption is a source of untold benefaction 
to the evil as well as the good; for the Lord 
does not discriminate between saint and sin- 
ner. Hence, in nature and in the civil order 
of society He works on as untiringly and un- 
ceasingly for all alike as if the Church of the 
regenerate were to be co-extensive with the 
race of natural men. Not only so : when the 
civil man fails of moral and spiritual life, he is 
still cared for by the Lord's mercy, and can 
make his bed in no hell where the Divine Prov- 
idence does not overshadow him with protect- 
ing love. When we talk of redemption, let us 
not forget what it means for the evil as well as 
for the good, and for the natural man as well 
as for the spiritual man. The natural man is 
bound to reap the external fruits of that re- 
demption, whether he will or not ; the spirit- 
ual man, if he will, may go farther and gather 
its internal fruits. But in either case the nat- 
ural advantages precede, and are in no wise 
the product of private regeneration. 

What we need in the political sphere is not 
that the man of the Church should pose as a 
regenerated wire-puller, and so hope to wield 
a subtle, disseminating power of improvabil- 
ity ; but that the man of the Church and the 
man of the world should combine (from what 



The Natural Modifies the Spiritual, yi 



spiritual motives the Lord alone knows) in the 
exercise of that vigilance which is the price of 
social security and the common good, and re- 
quire and enable all public servants, from mu- 
nicipal aldermen to national Congressmen 
(from what spiritual motives the Lord alone 
knows), to obey the rule of the rod of iron, 
which is that natural truth according to which 
nations progress and citizens prosper, and 
which at the last analysis is identical with the 
ten full words that were written on the tables 
of stone. Then eventually we shall have a 
civil order that will so administer "the suffi- 
ciency of wealth" as to secure to all "the 
necessaries of life, work, and protection," and 
that will so guarantee individual freedom ac- # 
cording to reason as to allow every one who 
so wishes to go on from being a merely civil 
man and become a moral man, and, still fur- 
ther, to allow every one who so wills to go on 
from being a civil and moral man and become 
a spiritual man. "Leges Decalogi fiunt primum 
leges civile s, postea morales, et demum spirit- 
uales." 



The Church and the World. 



I. 



THE CHURCH THE MOTIVE OF CRE- 



LL love is expansive, active, and creative; 



and the Divine Love is nothing if it is 



not infinite activity in the production of 
forms that can be receptive and reciprocative 
of itself. But mineral, plant, and animal are 
totally incapable of cognizing and enjoying 
Divine life as of themselves. Only self-con- 
scious, human forms of life can do that : only 
they have a will that can house and delight in 
the Divine Go\)d ; only they have an under- 
standing that can tabernacle and co-operate 
with the Divine Truth. Hence, the whole cre- 
ation groans in travail to produce the natural 
man, who is the final fruition and crown of 
physical evolution. Of course, the natural 
man that is thus* produced is of the earth, 
earthy. His mind is formed and furnished 
from the external world that has mothered him 
and nursed his dawning capabilities. True, it 
is much that he is dust: but dust is all he is. 
He has been created a plastic stuff : it still re- 
mains for him to be formed and made. He is 



ATI ON. 




7 6 



The Church and the World, 



really made man only when the Lord has 
breathed into his naturally created dust-form 
the transforming breath of a living Divine love 
and a living Divine wisdom. Then the man 
becomes a living soul. The living soul feels 
Divine good as its own, and thinks Divine 
truth functionally and normally as if to the 
manner born. Here we have now not a man- 
animal, but a man-angel. In other words, the 
human mind with its distinctive range of fac- 
ulties is no longer dominated by the world 
without, whence it was created ; but the dust 
has been thoroughly subordinated to idea. 
The man lives from the Word or Thought of 
God : he has become a God-form, having the 
image and likeness of the Divine Creator. 
His life therefore is heavenly, and not worldly. 
And when he drops the material matrix in 
which he was moulded, and passes into the 
other life, he is called simply an angel; that is 
to say, he has become a permanent epistle of 
the Lord's truth, a voluntary messenger to 
eternity of the Divine grace that goes forth to 
love and save and bless. 

This spiritually formed man, or angel, is es- 
sentially the Lord's heaven ; and heaven in its 
totality is simply the free and rational union 
and federation of those from all earths and 



The Church the Motive of Creation. 



77 



all ages who have suffered themselves to be 
changed from mere dust-forms of the world 
into living, spiritual forms of the Divine Truth 
or Word of God. Heaven is in the perfect 
form of man, because it is made in the largest 
sense a strict likeness of the Divine, which is 
essential love and essential wisdom, or the In- 
finite Man, of whom spiritual men and angels 
are first and last merely finite and recipient 
vessels and images. 

This gives us the truest and the highest 
conception of the Church. Every man is a 
Church in least form who has genuine love 
for good and genuine faith in truth — into 
whom in any measure the breath of spiritual 
life has been infused; and the universal Church 
is the interior association of all those who are 
thus in themselves the Church in least form. 
This Church, which entirely defies mere local 
definition, and is known accurately by the 
Lord alone, is the earthly counterpart of 
heaven. Heaven and the Church are one. 
The Church is the kingdom of heaven on 
earth : the kingdom of heaven in the spiritual 
world is the Church triumphant. Together 
they constitute the final end of all God's op- 
erations in physical nature and in human 
history. 



j8 The Church and the World, 



" He who is able to receive the Divine, so as to 
see and perceive it in himself, cannot but be con- 
joined with the Lord, and by this conjunction live 
forever. What would the Lord have to do with all 
trie creation of the universe, unless He had also cre- 
ated images and likenesses of himself to whom He 
could communicate his Divine? Otherwise, what 
else would there be but making something to be and 
not to be, or to exist and not to exist, and this for no 
other purpose than that He might be able from afar 
to contemplate mere vicissitudes and continual 
changes as upon some stage? What would there be 
Divine in these things, unless they were for the sake of 
service to subjects which should receive the Divine 
more nearly, and see and feel it ? And as the Divine 
is of glory inexhaustible, would He keep it to himself 
alone, and could He do so? For love wishes to 
communicate its own to another, yes, to give from 
its own as much as possible. Why not the Divine 
Love, which is infinite? Can it give, and take away 
again ? Would not this be giving what is about to 
perish ? which inwardly in itself is nothing, because 
when it perishes it becomes nothing ; that which Is 
is not in it. But it gives what Is, or which does not 
cease to be ; and this is eternal " (D. P. 324). 

If we perceive that the Lord is ever aiming 
at the creation of spiritual forms of life, and 
that physical manifestations and developments 
are only means to that spiritual creation, we 
have the point of view from which to consider 
Swedenborg's various statements to the effect 
that if it were not for the Church the human 
race would become insane and perish. Not 



The Church the Motive of Creation. yg 



so long ago a gentleman married a lady 
of great beauty and grace, and was almost 
immediately led by business exigencies to take 
up his abode in a new locality. Being a man 
of substance, he at once proposed to himself 
a " commodious and handsome habitation," 
where he and his bride could make their home. 
With energy the foundations were prepared, 
the building materials collected, the walls 
erected, and the roof constructed. While 
work was being pushed forward on the inte- 
rior and on the doors and windows, like a bolt 
out of a clear sky came the illness and death 
of the young wife. The dispirited and dis- 
traught bridegroom lost his hold on life, and 
resorted to travel in foreign lands as a means 
of recovering his tone and vigor. Immediate- 
ly the arena of bustle and exertion became a 
theatre of desolation. Neglect soon made its 
mark, and dilapidation came on apace. Icha- 
bod was written on every stone, and joist, and 
shingle. This incident from real life illustrates 
the precise truth concerning the relation of the 
spiritual or heavenly Church to nature and his- 
tory. For, why did all these operations cease 
with the taking off of the bride ? Certainly it 
was not because the husband had relied on her 
to dig the cellar or haul the bricks, or even to 



8o 



The Church and the World. 



diffuse herself and "make her influence felt" 
among the masons and carpenters. She was 
not the means by which, but the end for which 
the house was building. Love for her of one 
kind and plane was sufficient to lead him to 
set and keep in action for the accomplishment 
of his purpose forces and motives of quite an- 
other order and operative on an altogether dif- 
ferent plane. Her loss deprived him of his 
end, depleted his plans of their sanity, and by 
consequence his project perished. 

Exactly so is it with the temple of human- 
ity which the Lord is building within the pre- 
cincts of the created universe. It is the end 
that gives all their intent and quality to the 
means. The spiritual Church, with its heaven- 
ly harvest of angels, is the sole-sufficient end 
of creation, and if we could imagine that 
Church to be wholly destroyed (not only in 
fact but in potency), then the Almighty would 
lose his motive in creating, and hence the hu- 
man race as naturally avouched would become 
insane, that is, would have no reason for being, 
would be destitute of a Divine end ; and the 
earths having no inhabitants would perish, not 
because they were evolved from the people 
dwelling on them, but because, there being no 
longer the possibility of a Church, the Lord 



The Church the Motive of Creation. 81 



would cease to keep in motion those influ- 
ences and agencies which had produced the 
physical realm and the natural man as means 
to the end of a heaven of angels. 

The knowledge of God's aim and end in 
our creation should give us the pitch in our 
own aspiration and endeavor. If we were cre- 
ated to be conjoined with God, we should pur- 
sue the regenerate way simply that we may 
thus come into the order of our nature. 
There has appeared among us an untenable 
form of sentiment that appeals to the pseudo- 
altruism of the natural man. He is exhort- 
ed, if he will not do righteousness on his own 
account, to do it for the sake of those he 
loves, because it will be so beneficial to wife 
and children, to friends and society ; and the 
exhortation is driven home by the text, " For 
their sakes I sanctify myself." But is it for 
one moment to be supposed that our Lord 
made his primary choice of the Divine, or ful- 
filled the order of his eternal nature, for the 
sake of man? From the force of his Paternal 
heredity he was born aspiring to and striving 
after the Divine. In himself He could by no 
possibility be or choose to be anything but the 
Divine. From infinite love He assumed a Hu- 
man as a means by which to save mankind, 

6 



82 The Church and the World. 



and in the world from his innate Divine, which 
was his internal Self, He surveyed his assumed 
nature as an added or external Self, which He 
purposed to make one with his inmost life. 
For the sake of men He had assumed this ex- 
ternal : for " their sakes " He made it the 
business of his life in the world to sanctify it 
— that is, so to consecrate it, set it apart, train 
it, equip it, energize it, and make it Divine, 
that it would be a perfect organ of Eternal 
Love in the salvation and benefaction of the 
race of men. But all this was a work that fell 
clearly within the compass of his inherent or 
primary quality or end, which operated in his 
glorification as in creation from the Divine 
to the Divine; and moreover, this culture and 
consecration of his assumed Self was for noth- 
ing short of the achievement of a purely Di- 
vine end in man's establishment as the immor- 
tal tabernacle of God. " The glory which 
thou hast given me I have given unto them." 
The Lord's work is accomplished in the meas- 
ure that man as of himself becomes conscious- 
ly conjoined to God in love and faith. " They 
are thine : and all things that are mine are 
thine, and thine are mine : and I am glorified 
in them." In the operations of Divine Provi- 
dence in behalf of human progress eternal 



The Church the Motive of Creation. 83 



ends are ever held in view, and all things are 
made subsidiary and mediary to the final end 
of conjunction with God, but that conjunction 
is never made a mediate end to any lesser 
good. 

This is the law also in all that the man of 
the Church does as of himself. Union with 
God in love and truth is an end of life quite 
sufficient in itself. It alone supplies the final, 
crowning, and all-comprehensive logic of hu- 
man existence and experience. Regeneration 
is a marriage, and the spiritual essence of mar- 
riage is that neither party can by any possibil- 
ity seek an advantage from the other. No 
doubt every one who becomes conjoined to 
God does in his degree enter into the Divine 
joy of doing good. But the Lord espouses his 
Bride, the Church, not to make her his house- 
keeper, but because He loves her for her own 
sake and finds the joy of his heart in her re- 
sponsive love. When man loves God from a 
Divine end, then the Lord has found his 
" other," in whom He can dwell as in his own 
and fulfill his heart's intention with Divine un- 
selfishness. And when the wedded Church 
assumes her wifely cares, she is animated by 
no servile fear or sordid hope, for like her 
Lord she cherishes eternal ends, and as of her- 



8 4 



The Church and the World. 



self she sets about transforming the earth from 
a mere house for man's body into a congenial 
home for his soul. There can be no true love 
for man that does not spring from the love of 
God. This is the inward truth embodied in 
the phenomenon described by Swedenborg, 
that in heaven every angel has the Lord ever 
before him. From inmost to outmost the re- 
generated man or angel points with every intu- 
ition, every instinct, every longing, every fac- 
ulty, every activity to the Lord as a centre, 
and by consequence in the return in man's rela- 
tions with his fellows the Lord is the source 
of all his regenerate experience, delight, and 
fruitfulness. Prior to all marriage, friendship, 
use is this primal homage to the Divine, and 
hence marriage and friendship and use are gift- 
ed with eternal life. Man's love of God from 
God is the supreme thing of creation, which 
alone gives meaning to the physical and his- 
toric evolution leading up to it, and likewise to 
all social and human benefaction streaming 
down from it. 

This new creation of the soul is an end for 
which all natural and spiritual things may be 
utilized, but which must never be made use 
of as a means to the accomplishment of any 
civil, moral, or even spiritual mediate end. 



The Church the Motive of Creation. 



85 



Every plane of life is innocent in itself, and its 
motive and means for procuring its own good 
are innocent. Each plane becomes instinct 
with a new and higher life when it is adopted 
by motives and made serviceable to uses be- 
longing to a plane above itself ; but it be- 
comes degraded and degenerate just to the 
extent that its peculiar good is made the ser- 
vant or means to a good lower than itself. 
Man may pursue wealth for its own sake, and 
so be purely a man of the world ; or he may 
pursue it for the sake of higher uses, and so 
aid in the work of his regeneration. But it is 
an utter subversion of order for him to employ 
spiritual things as a means to the obtainment 
of earthly riches. He may seek health as a 
good on its own plane, and so be a harmless 
animal ; or he may seek it as a means of use- 
fulness to others, and as a basis of sound men- 
tal and spiritual conditions in himself. But he 
is guilty of profanation when he uses the 
holiness of the soul as a remedy or preventive 
of any fleshly ill. Regeneration must not be 
sought as a means to happiness, or culture, or 
external development of whatsoever sort, ei- 
ther of the individual or of society. And the 
Church simply compasses the stultification of 
its own commission when it calls men to 



86 The Church and the World. 



righteousness of the interior life with the se- 
ductive promise that all lower desirable good 
things will follow as a matter of course. The 
relation of superior good to inferior good is 
not that of servant or means, but that of mas- 
ter and owner and inhabitant. 

The acknowledgment of God is the begin- 
ning of all positive religion. "Seek ye first 
the kingdom of God and his righteousness, " 
is the insistent injunction of the Gospel and 
the motto of the "Arcana Ccelestia." It is 
true that this message concerning the high- 
water mark of human life is heard in diverse 
ways by different ears. While man is unspirit- 
ual he.obeys the Word from crass and imperfect 
motives. Still, the appeal of the Church must 
be to the deepest instincts, the latent capaci- 
ties for the highest life. From the very incep- 
tion of religious consciousness, the Church 
should provide that every one have before his 
mind the ideal of a life in conjunction with 
God in genuine love and faith as the goal 
of his personal destiny. However unreal and 
far removed it may seem in his early stages of 
reformation and regeneration, to him who 
looks to the Lord and shuns his evils as sins 
the day will surely come when righteousness 
will be as easy as breathing, when he will 



The Church the Motive of Creation, 87 

love good spontaneously for its own sake, and 
rejoice in the truth because his mind and the 
truth were given for each other. To him who 
puts the kingdom of heaven in the first place 
all lesser, external things of mind, body, and 
estate acquire an added spiritual value and in- 
ternal serviceableness, because they are inhab- 
ited and dominated by Divine ends. 



II. 



THE UNCONSCIOUS MEDIUMSHIP OF 
THE CHURCH. 

/CONJUNCTION with God is possible only 
\j to a form of life that has in itself a 
-plane where God and what is from God 
cannot be consciously discriminated. Hence we 
find Swedenborg describing the supreme de- 
gree of the human mind as the Lord's entrance 
to angels and men and his veriest dwelling- 
place with them, and as belonging indifferently 
to the Creator and the creature. That is the 
topmost stratum of human life, higher than 
the farthest play of consciousness. The other 
extreme of man's life, of course, is the sen- 
suous. Out of the material he is born more 
helpless than any animal, but in origin and 
quality as regards the sensuous alone there is 
absolutely no distinction between man and 
man, or between man and the animal. Sheer 
communism dominates the lowest stratum of 
human life, the plane of mere sense which 
subtends and supports consciousness. 

There being thus in every man a supreme 
inmost which makes one with God and an ex- 



Unconscious Mediums hip of the Church, 89 

treme outmost which makes one with matter, it 
follows that there must be in him organically 
all the degrees and planes of mind that lie be- 
tween. His human consciousness must make 
its home in some intermediate or middle re- 
gion between the lowest and the highest. Re- 
generation is simply the opening upward to 
consciousness of the planes of life that can be 
made recipient of the Divine from above; 
while degeneration is the permanent closure 
of the upper degrees of which man is natu- 
rally unconscious, and the opening of degrees 
which strike downward and confirm him in sub- 
jection to infernalized forces that limit his 
growth and delight to those sensuous appe- 
tites and interests that should be normally 
under his feet. When in order man is a veri- 
table ladder of life, with its foot on the earth 
and its top in heaven where is the Lord Jeho- 
vah. He is regenerated when there is an un- 
impeded ascent and descent of angelic good 
and truth on this opened, furnished, shin- 
ing stairway. In like manner, every man 
is a latent microcosm, in whom is repeated 
the whole cosmic creation without. Not only 
does he reach from granite up to God, but he 
has a million-nerved touch to feel the lateral 
contact and impact of the whole creation on 



9° 



The Church and the World. 



every plane through which the upright shaft 
of his consciousness penetrates. It is in this 
realm of intermediates, where consciousness 
is exploited, that we make our spiritual 
heavens and hells, and our manifold racial and 
personal distinctions and combinations among 
men. 

The inmost degree is the Lord's alone, and 
this " secret place of the Most High" cannot 
be alienated from the constitution of any man. 
However we may be divided biographically 
and historically in destiny, we all are one in 
essence. The Divine eye sees the whole hu- 
man creation as one man. And because of 
this essential unity before God, all our external 
sectionalizing of the human race is more ap- 
parent than real. All discriminations are arbi- 
trary and absurd that do not flow from the prin- 
ciple that the part must be free to be itself and 
bring out the best that is in it, that so it may 
functionate its highest distinctive use for the 
whole. The best citizens in intelligent nations 
are rapidly having their eyes opened to the 
childishness of antagonisms between different 
peoples on the same earth. The air is charged 
with a new sense of the truth that, despite 
distance, speech, temperament, color, tradi- 
tions, we are of the same family. In a larger 



Unconsciotis Medinmship of the Church, pi 

view, we see from doctrine and the simple 
good feel intuitively that, if there be but one 
heavenly Father, then the inhabitants of all 
earths, the saved in all heavens, the erring in 
all hells must belong to one great domestic 
solidarity. 

We are one in essence, because the good 
and the bad alike have an inmost where the 
Lord keeps his immediate hold from within 
on all with Divine impartiality. We are one 
in nature, because we all alike are born from 
the womb of the external universe, and there 
the Lord has the same immediate grasp on us 
that He has on all subjects of a dead sun and 
a natural influx. It is in the realm of inter- 
mediates that we discover a new and different 
law of influx and communication. The Lord 
sees the human race in inmosts as one man, 
he sees it in ultimates as one man, and He 
sees it in intermediates (where endless dis- 
tinctions report themselves to finite conscious- 
ness) also as one man. If the reader grasps this 
truth of the persistent unity of the race in its 
Godward aspect, and remembers that human 
consciousness (with its knowledge of nature, 
knowledge of self, and knowledge of God) 
could not be developed without manifold ex- 
periences in a world of contrasts and compari- 



g2 The Church and the World. 



sons, of voluntary choice and free action, he 
will understand the pith and core of the phi- 
losophy of Divine revelation. That revelation 
is not an afterthought of God. It is his sole 
means of making man. Like any finite work- 
er, God can do things only by his Truth, or 
Thought, or Word. The Logos is the univer- 
sal Creator. By that Word is produced the 
spiritual realm that lies above consciousness; 
by that Word is evolved the material universe 
outside of and independent of consciousness ; 
and if ever man is to become the image of 
God, as of himself thinking God's thoughts, 
he must, above the din of the discordant 
voices of a divided humanity, hear the Word 
of the Lord spoken to him in his specific ver- 
nacular. In the domain of intermediates the 
Lord never loses sight of a heaven of angels 
as his creative end — the same end that He has 
in first principles and in ultimates. Men can 
be changed from mere dust forms of the world 
into spiritual forms of heaven only by a knowl- 
edge of Divine Truth, and that knowledge 
cannot be imparted by nature, which is the 
abject menial of a common influx intent on 
producing dead forms of external loves. The 
transforming truth must be breathed down, 
over, and in by revelation. The highest angel 



Unconscious Mediumship of the Church, pj 

never outgrows this need of revelation ; how- 
ever it may change its outward garb or letter, 
it is an indispensable factor in the production 
and sustentation of truly human forms of life. 
The unity of mankind is exhibited in the uni- 
versality of the religious instinct. The basest 
tribes have the rudiments of religion and 
traditional superstitions that have come down 
through many perversions from ancient, pre- 
historic Scripture. The great truth thus sym- 
bolized is that humanity from top to bottom, 
from centre to circumference, is held in oneness 
throughout the domain of consciousness by 
the presence and power of the creative Word, 
which stands forth in revealable and knowable 
form before its voluntary and intelligent crea- 
tion, and dressed in raiment adapted to the di- 
verse perception of angels and men. By the 
Word the Lord enlightens and vivifies his uni- 
versal human creation, and by it he keeps his 
hold upon men in the intermediate sphere of 
consciousness, with the same masterful con- 
trol that is maintained over them by immedi- 
ate influx in things inmost and things outmost. 

" The Word is a medium uniting man with the 
Lord; and unless there were such a uniting medium, 
heaven could not flow in with man; for without a 
medium it could not be united, but would remove 



94- 



The Church and the World. 



itself away from man. And if it were removed no 
one could any longer be led to good, not even to 
corporeal and worldly good; but all bonds, even ex- 
ternal, would be broken. For the Lord rules man 
who is in good by internal bonds, which are of con- 
science, but one who is in evil only by external 
bonds; and if these should be broken, every one 
would be insane, with such insanity as he who is 
without fear of the law, without fear for his life, and 
without fear of the loss of honor and gain, and thus 
of reputation — for these are the external bonds — 
and so the human race would perish. From this it 
may be evident why the Word exists, and what the 
character of the Word is" (A. C. 4217) 

" There must of necessity be a communication of 
heaven with man, in order that mankind may exist, 
and this through the Church ; otherwise they would 
become as beasts without internal and external 
bonds, and thus would rush headlong without re- 
straint to the destruction of each other, and would 
mutually extinguish each other" (A. C. 4545). 

" It is provided by the Lord that there should al- 
ways be a Church on earth, since by means of the 
Church there is a conjunction of the Lord with man- 
kind, and of heaven with the world. There the Lord 
is known, and therein are Divine truths by which 
man is conjoined to him " (N. J. H. D. 5). 

" Conjunction with heaven cannot be given un- 
less there is somewhere on earth a Church where the 
Word is, and the Lord is known by it ; because the 
Lord is the God of heaven and earth, and without 
the Lord there is no salvation. It is enough that 
there be a Church where the Word is, although it 
consist of comparatively few; still by the Word the 
Lord is present in the whole world, for by it heaven 
is conjoined with the human race" (S. S. 104). 



Unconsciotis Mediumship of the Church. 95 

" By the Word communication is given with the 
universal heaven. For this reason, by the Divine 
Providence of the Lord there is a universal com- 
merce of the kingdoms of Europe (and chiefly of 
those where the Word is read) with the nations out 
of the Church" (S. S. 108). 

"From this it may be evident that the Word 
which is in the Church of the Reformed enlightens 
all nations and peoples by spiritual communication ; 
also that it is provided by the Lord that there should 
always be on the earth a Church where the Word is 
read, and by it the Lord is known. Wherefore when 
the Word was almost rejected by the Papists, from 
the Lord's Divine Providence the Reformation took 
place, whereby the Word was again received ; and 
also that the Word is held holy by a noble nation 
among the Papists " (S. S. no). 

What we need to see clearly, in the first 
place, is that it is by the Word in some form 
that all light and life are communicated to the 
human mind. Heaven and the Church are 
alike dependent on the Word. This is the 
medium that binds the heavens and the earths 
together, and so unites man in the world with 
the Lord. It is the means, moreover, by 
which the race has a really human intercom- 
munication and unification on every plane of 
its existence. Then, further, we must see with 
equal clearness that the reception of the Word 
creates the Church. Heaven is simply a con- 
summate and congregate form of the Word. 



9 6 



The Church and the World. 



The angel is the finite embodiment and ex- 
pression of the Word. Every good man has 
the letter and the spirit of the Word tran- 
scribed in his character and person. Now, the 
Word in itself has both a celestial and a spir- 
itual sense, Divine good as well as Divine 
truth, inhabiting its letter, and the angel or 
regenerate man, according to the degree of 
his regeneration, becomes the form of the 
Lord's good as well as of his truth. But he 
must receive the truth before he can embody 
the good, and so it follows that on the 
earth unregenerate men as well as those who 
are regenerating can be intellectual images of 
the Word, or think in accordance with its 
truths. Hence, all human forms of life, from 
the highest angel down to the most external 
man on earth with any knowledge of the Word, 
are prepared organs by which the light and 
life of the Word can be mediated to others. 
Where the truth of the Word is there is the 
doctrine that makes the Church, and the 
Church as the custodian and teacher of doc- 
trine is the Lord's medium of conjunction be- 
tween heaven and earth, and the means by 
which the Divine can be among men. The 
Church does not make the Word or subordi- 
nate it to itself. It is created by the Word, 



Unconscious Mediumship of the Church, gy 

and it is only as a depositary of the Word 
that it is able to functionate a mediatorship of 
the Divine in the midst of men on the earth. 

The Lord's kingdom is a kingdom of uses, 
and it is a law of the Divine economy that, as 
soon as any form of life is created, it shall be 
made a productive subject of that kingdom, 
and be set to the accomplishment of the high- 
est uses of which it is capable. Although the 
Lord can dispense if need be with all custom- 
ary media, he never does immediately from 
himself what he can do by means which are 
ready to hand ; and he never employs a round- 
about method when a more direct agency for 
reaching the same end presents itself. For 
example, in the first creation of man the Lord 
could find for him neither a human father nor 
a human mother. In some way he was cre- 
ated through the formative mediumship of spir- 
itual spheres on the one hand, and out of a 
mother-substance furnished by the kingdoms 
of nature on the other. But when upon the 
earth man had once been formed male and fe- 
male, we cannot conceive of the Lord contin- 
uing to do by indirect processes what He 
could achieve through normal births from 
forms already existing. Thenceforward the 
production of the human race was carried on 

7 



9 8 



The Church and the World. 



by man's procreation of his own kind. In 
like manner, we can imagine a time when dis- 
tinctively human thought was produced pri- 
marily in innocent minds without personal 
agency by a conjunction of spiritual influx 
from man's inmost with the sense impressions 
made by nature upon his purely animal con- 
sciousness. But when that work was once 
done, and heaven and earth were peopled with 
human thinkers of Divine truth, it would be 
marvelous if the Lord did not utilize those 
mental organizations as media for the transflux 
of his truth and good. No law is more dis- 
tinctly affirmed by Swedenborg than that all 
goods and truths that are made consciously 
man's own are begotten and born in the mind 
according to a principle of spiritual procrea- 
tion, that all affections and thoughts that exist 
in one mind flow in through other minds, and 
that the Lord can insure progress to no one 
excepting in so far as he has already some 
truth through which what is about to be 
given can be born. The same law holds good 
of all degenerate forms of human life, with 
their evil affections and false thoughts. We 
are indissolubly bound one to another through- 
out the length and breadth of our racial expe- 
rience. No solitary can exist in the realm of 



Unconscious Mediumship of the Church, gg 

mind. The most virile freedom and the high- 
est individuality are compatible with the most 
exacting law of interdependence and inter- 
communication. 

All life comes from God, but it is variously 
exploited by its recipients. Heaven and hell, 
angel and devil are contrary expressions of 
one and the same life. And, however it may 
be desecrated and abused and diverted to in- 
fernal mischief, all power is Divine- — Divine in 
its origin and persistency; and all forming and 
reforming of the human mind and human life 
are the result of the Divine Providence oper- 
ating through truth. Every mind — even the 
most perverted — must have the instinct of ap- 
propriating truth in its own way or it could 
not exist. There can be no disordered form 
in creation that the Divine Providence cannot 
supply with a native, congenial aliment. The 
law we find in nature, where every fish, and 
bird, and beast gets its exactly suitable nour- 
ishment, is repeated with higher force in the 
domain of mind. Truth, as it descends from 
the immaculate Divine Wisdom of the Lord, 
is received by and sustains the angels of the 
celestial heaven in one way, those of the spir- 
itual heaven in another way, and those of the 
ultimate heaven in yet another. More remote- 



100 



The Church and the World. 



ly> good spirits and regenerating men take 
what they can receive. Then the truth falls 
into forms more and more removed from its 
original quality as it passes through planes of 
thought common to the natural man and the 
evil. So to the lowest in the lowest hell it de- 
scends, and in its descent it is adapted to the 
necessity of each recipient. The vilest devils 
are nourished by the Lord's Divine Truth — 
that same truth as to essence which gives life 
to the purest and most exalted of the angels. 

From summit to base, from heart to rind 
of humanity the Lord makes use of all men, 
good or evil, as media of his benefaction. 
With or without their will, He enlists all in 
the service of Divine ends, and what He does 
through men is for the most part unrecognized 
by them. The angels in heaven are intent on 
the practical uses that fall within the sphere of 
their own lives, and they are full of the prox- 
imate joy of doing good to those who are 
more or less intimately related to their own 
persons or their immediate society. Only for 
exceptional purposes do they visit other socie- 
ties or other heavens. They are habitually 
unconscious of the marvelous volume of good 
which the Lord is accomplishing through each 
heaven for the others, and through all the 



Unconscious Mediumship of the Church. 101 



heavens for the earth. Even by the conscious 
good and true things they do the Lord is gain- 
ing ends that lie utterly beyond their com- 
prehension. They do not know as they are 
known. And what the Lord does through 
them does not depend on their regeneration. 
The light and life of which they are the me- 
dia are exclusively from the Word. Divine 
Truth borrows no efficiency from the sanc- 
tity of its partisans. Swedenborg is most 
careful to guard us against the notion that re- 
generation can in any wise be the fountain of 
reforming or saving power, and he declares 
that even before the incarnation, when the 
Lord's Human could come to men on the 
earth only through heaven, it was not the in- 
nate or imparted holiness of the angels that 
supplied this mediatorial efficacy. 

" The Lord, when He made his Human Divine, 
did this from the Divine by transflux through heaven. 
Not that heaven contributed anything of itself ; but, 
that the Divine Itself might be enabled to inflow into 
the Human, it flowed in through heaven. This 
transflux was the Divine Human before the coming 
of the Lord, and was Jehovah Himself in the heav- 
ens, or was the Lord" (A. C. 6720). 

Indeed, where the Lord makes use of men 
or angels, even for the spiritual or regenerative 



102 The Church and the World, 



purposes of his Church, it is not their regener- 
ation (which is the final and not a mediate end 
of his creative and redemptive endeavor) that 
he employs, but those things in them which 
are capable of forming a bond of connection 
and channel of communication with the affec- 
tions and thoughts of those on a lower level. 
Thus those spiritual and heavenly things with 
which the higher and more advanced are in- 
trusted may be transmitted to those who in 
some degree make one with them in natural 
and personal interests and conceptions. 

" It is to be noted that some things also come from 
the angels themselves who are attendant on man ; 
but all the good and truth which are of faith and 
charity, that is, of new life with man, come from the 
Lord alone, also by the angels from Him ; in like 
manner, all arrangement, which is continual, for that 
use. The things which come from the angels them- 
selves are such as accommodate themselves to the 
affections of man, and in themselves are not goods, 
but still serve for introducing goods and truths which 
are from the Lord" (A. C. 8728). 

The Lord uses good men and angels as 
instruments of his gracious purposes, but the 
good or truth he imparts gathers no more of 
its substance or quality from their persons or 
their regeneration than water does of its oxy- 
gen or hydrogen from the pipes through which 



Unconscious Mediumship of the Church, ioj 



it flows. But the pipes may have peculiarities 
of their own that make them serviceable in fit- 
ting certain cisterns, or in standing certain cli- 
mates, or in their adaptability to certain condi- 
tions of soil. And the corresponding charac- 
teristics in good men and bad men are utilized 
by the Lord according to their serviceableness 
with a Divine impartiality. 

It must be remembered that all good in the 
regenerate man, and the uses that flow from it, 
are formed and functioned by truths. So far 
as any one is in charity he is in truth, and it is 
the Divine Truth that has made the highest 
and inmost in heaven and in the Church to be 
what they are. The Word is with them, find- 
ing or making the best channels for its flow. 

" These three kinds of men constitute the 
Church : They who are in the good of chanty con- 
stitute the internal of the Church ; they who are in 
few truths, and still desire to be instructed, thus who 
are in the affection of truth from good, constitute 
the external of the Church ; while they who are in 
the delights of external truth are the extremes, and 
make, so to speak, the circumference, and close the 
Church. The conjunction of heaven with the human 
race, that is, the conjunction of the Lord through 
heaven with man, is effected by those who are in the 
good of charity, thus by the good of charity, 
for in that good the Lord is present, because 
the Lord is that good itself. Through that 



104- 



The Church and the World, 



good the Lord conjoins himself with those who are 
in the affection of truth, for the affection of truth is 
from good, and good, as was said, is from the Lord. 
Through these again the Lord is with those who are 
in the delights of external truth, for the delights ap- 
pertaining to them are for the most part derived 
from the loves of self and the world, and very little 
from spiritual good" (A. C. 9276). 

Quite apart from the Lord's desire to give 
to his children his own joy of doing good, the 
Divine Providence makes a prior or preferred 
use, as media to high spiritual ends, of such 
interior things in man as are animate with regen- 
erate life as soon as they can be found. This is 
not from arbitrary choice, but because for dis- 
tinctively internal and heavenly uses the regen- 
erate man is a ready-prepared, self-supporting 
channel of good. With the man who is in 
charity the truth by which the Word can be 
mediated is fixed by an internal principle and 
support. So far as one is saved by the truth, 
he becomes established a voluntary or sponta- 
neous form of truth, and needs no outside 
prop or control. 

But we must not conclude that there is any 
end, apart from their own regeneration, which 
the Lord cannot gain without the concurrence 
of those who are regenerate. From self-love 
the preacher of truth may proclaim the Word 



Unconsciotis Mediumship of the Church, ioj 



with more zeal and practical efficiency than 
are wont to characterize the most devoted min- 
isters who are animated by genuine love for 
the Lord and the neighbor. It is through 
men that the Lord works for the conscious 
good of the human race, but that does not 
mean that he is limited to certain kinds of 
men as his agents. 

"The Lord does good to every one chiefly 
through others, but yet in such wise that a man 
scarcely knows but that [it is done] from himself. 
He therefore frequently moves the wicked to do good 
to others ; but it is from an affection of the love of 
self and of the world. This good, it is true, is of the 
Lord, or from the Lord ; but the man is not reward- 
ed for it" (Charity, 8). 

In the case of the Hebrew Church we see 
the Lord's power to maintain his hold upon 
the world by means of the Word, in spite of 
the fact that those who constituted the Church 
on earth were utterly destitute of spiritual life. 

" By such things at that time, of the Lord's Di- 
vine Providence, there was maintained a communica- 
tion of the angels of heaven with man ; for there 
must needs be somewhere a Church, or the represen- 
tative of a Church, that there may be communica- 
tion of heaven with the human race ; and because 
that nation more than any other could place Divine 
worship in external things, and so act the representa- 
tive of a Church, that nation was taken. Communi- 



io6 The Church and the World, 



cation with the angels in heaven by representatives 
was effected at that time in this way : Their external 
worship was communicated with angelic spirits who 
are simple and do not reflect on internal things, but 
who still are inwardly good. Such are they in Max- 
ivius Homo who correspond to the skin. These pay 
no attention to the internal of man, but only to his 
external ; if this appears holy, they also think holily 
concerning it. The interior angels of heaven saw in 
those spirits the things that were represented, conse- 
quently the heavenly and Divine things which corre- 
sponded; for they could be present with angelic 
spirits and see those things, but not with man except 
through them. For the angels dwell with men in 
what is interior, but where interior things do not ex- 
ist with men, the angels dwell in what is interior with 
simple spirits, since the angels have relish only for 
things spiritual and celestial, which are the interior 
things contained in representatives. From this it 
may be seen how communication with heaven could 
be effected through such a people " (A. C. 8588; 
see also A. C. 7893). 

In truth, the total incapacity of the Jews 
for spiritual regeneration in this life was what 
made them the most fit of all nations as Provi- 
dential custodians of representative sacred 
things. Their superstition and idolatry re- 
garded the written letter of the Word as a fe- 
tich, and so preserved it sacrosanct until the 
Eternal Word itself was made flesh and in a 
glorified humanity took up a permanent 
abode among us. By the infinite range and 



Unconscious Mediumship of the Church, ioy 

adaptability of his own Human Nature the 
Lord did away with the necessity of depend- 
ing on any sort of voluntary co-operation on 
the part of man to enable him to be present 
with revealing, saving power with the whole of 
human kind. The sceptre in heaven and on 
earth departed utterly from Judah when Shiloh 
came. 

The Lord hath taken to himself his great 
power and doth reign. He is not obliged to 
rely on his creatures for the furtherance of any 
of his plans, and even in the accomplishment 
of spiritual uses his ability is not gauged by 
the presence or absence of man's regeneration. 
He adopts and adapts all men as mediating 
agencies of his life, not for his own sake, but 
for their sakes. His kingdom being a king- 
dom of uses, no subject of it could exist and 
not be useful. Hence He is infinitely active 
in imparting to every form of life a utilitarian 
sanity or objective reason for being, by making 
it worth while to the whole economy. All 
are his servants, and no man can avoid his 
destiny as an organ of use. 



III. 



THE CHURCH'S RESPONSIBLE MINIS- 
TRY OF SACRED THINGS. 

r I lHE Church exists in heaven because the 



Divine has secured a permanent abode 



in the consciousness of men: the Church 
is never wanting on the earth in order that 
the Divine may be in perpetual evidence be- 
fore the new-born of each succeeding gen- 
eration. In heaven the Church stays w T ith 
man the end of his destiny : on earth it meets 
him before the dawn of thought commissioned 
to supply every aid in helping him to find and 
fulfill that destiny. Hence it ought to be a 
very simple matter to understand and define 
the primary end and fundamental function of 
the Church as organized among us. 

The Lord works omnipotently and unceas- 
ingly by his Word for the salvation of the hu- 
man race : the Church is made a Church by its 
reception and possession and usufruct of the 
Word. Precisely in the degree that men or 
associations of men love, understand, and do 
the good and true things that are in and ema- 
nate from the Word have we the Church of 




Responsible Ministry of Sacred Things. 109 

the living God. The Jews had no understand- 
ing of the Word, thus no true love for it or 
obedience to it, and hence with them there 
was no genuine Church — only a simulacrum, 
an effigy of the Church. So long as sincere 
faith and charity were found among the early 
Christians, they had a good natural form of 
the Church; but, because they had only a 
slender understanding of the Word, the Primi- 
tive Church at its best was but the promise 
and prophecy of a rational and spiritual one 
that was to come. When priestly love of rule 
and secular love of gain waxed strong with 
the advancing centuries, the sun darkened and 
the Church's love and light were dissipated. 
And if we have a New Church in these days, 
it is simply because the Lord has vouchsafed 
to us a new and spiritual understanding of his 
Word. As that understanding becomes more 
widely diffused and more distinctly intelligent 
in the minds of faithful recipients, the office of 
the Church as a bond of communication be- 
tween heaven and the world, as a common 
organ of illumination to all the peoples on the 
earth, and as a reacting basis and support to 
the heaven of angels, will be established and 
perpetuated with a magnitude of blessing not 
dreamed of by ancient prophet or seer. 



no 



The Church and the World, 



And it is simply because the Lord loves us, 
and desires that we should have his love and 
joy as our own, that he calls us to the service 
of his Church. I know no words that kindle 
a warmer glow of affectionate zeal for the uses 
of the Church than those found in the fifteenth 
chapter of John. The whole discourse was a 
distinct revelation of the Lord's longing that 
the disciple or man of the Church should enter 
intimately and fearlessly into the knowledge 
and helpfulness with which his glorified hu- 
manity teemed. He was the Vine, bearing 
fruit through branches organically conjoined 
to himself and pulsating with his own Life- 
sap. " These things have I spoken unto you, 
that my joy may be in you, and that your joy 
may be filled full. . . . Ye are my friends, 
if ye do the things which I command you. 
No longer do I call you servants ; for the ser- 
vant knoweth not what his Lord doeth : but I 
have called you friends; for all things that I 
heard from my Father I have made known 
unto you." Just this is what distinguishes the 
man of the Church from the man of the world. 
Both are useful, but he who is regenerate is in 
his Lord's confidence. All alike are servants 
of God's will, but only the friends of the Lord 
respond lovingly and intelligently to that will. 



Responsible Ministry of Sacred Things, in 

All are inexorably controlled by the fiat of 
Providence ; but with the good man and angel 
the forceful, undiscriminating law becomes a 
commandment instinct with human sympathy 
and personal determinateness. 

When the Church feels the responsibility 
involved in the privilege of spiritual disciple- 
ship and friendship with its Lord, it longs to 
fulfill its mission in bearing much fruit. The 
Lord's end in creation becomes the Church's 
conscious, voluntary aim. He could be satis- 
fied with nothing short of a heaven of angels 
from the human race ; and so far as the Church 
is true to a right understanding of the Word, 
it never for one moment loses sight of its all- 
embracing use, which is to lead men out of 
the dust and ashes of worldliness into a life of 
heavenly-mindedness and Divinely-inspired 
usefulness. It is enthusiastic in the business 
of transforming men and women who are of 
the earth, earthy, into the spiritual image and 
likeness of God. In our day the forces of 
self-love, and the love of things seem to be 
regnant and rampant. Our children are born 
into a nursery where all is hurry and skurry in 
the pursuit of temporal interests. Early and 
late the world is with us, soothing, flattering, 
coaxing, cajoling, mocking, deceiving, threat- 



112 



The Church and the World. 



ening, crushing us. Whatever happens to us 
from babyhood to age, the world sees to 
it that itself is more and more. Now, the 
Church is here to tell us and make us feel that, 
although we were born in the world, we were 
not born for the world ; that while we must 
submit to the discipline of worldly experience, 
we may be saved from worldly evil ; that 
throughout all the tribulations and catastro- 
phes of the world, we may have a supreme 
peace which it can neither give nor take away; 
that by the life immortal for which we were 
born w r e are superior to the world, and that 
despite all appearances and vicissitudes we are 
bound to rise above and escape from the ani- 
mus and limitations of worldliness through the 
mighty aid of Him who has overcome the 
world. 

This message is not sent to any exclusive 
class of men in the world. The world can 
draw no distinctions, can create no castes that 
have the slightest validity in spiritual light. 
Whether the world blesses or bans its children, 
it has no power to change their quality. The 
world finds man dust and leaves him dust. 
Hence all sorts and conditions of men have 
precisely the same need for the Church. Not 
one of them can be changed from a dust form 



Responsible Ministry of Sacred Things, iij 

of the world into a spiritual form of heaven 
without the good and truth the Church has 
from the Word. The Church, therefore, can 
know no rich or poor, high or low, wise or sim- 
ple, by the standards of the world. Every 
rich and wise and strong man of the world is 
poverty-stricken, foolish, and emasculated 
when tried by a spiritual estimate of human 
life. Wherefore the Church is a Church only 
in the degree that it comes to all men with the 
promise and gift of life, the higher life that 
waxes more and more abundant to eternity. 

The Church is devoted to the welfare of its 
Lord's kingdom, and therefore has no interest 
in patronizing or antagonizing any civil condi- 
tions on their own account. It has no mission 
to repair any part of Caesar's domain in order 
to enhance ,the welfare of Caesar. It has no 
inherent or primary concern with the purely 
worldly rise or fall of external states. It fol- 
lows its Lord's example, and refuses to pray 
for the world. The self-love and world-love of 
earthly life are quite competent to take care 
of themselves in their own day and generation, 
and to pray for them or enlist heavenly influ- 
ences in their behalf would be at the best a 
superfluous shipping of coals to Newcastle. 
The Church is here not to create or re-create, 

8 



ii/f. The Church and the World. 



to form or re-form terrestrial kingdoms, but to 
find them and then to impart to them an inte- 
rior quality which will make the kingdoms of 
this earth to be the kingdoms of our God and 
of his Christ. 



IV. 



THE CHURCH'S INFLUENCE ON EX- 
TERNAL SOCIAL LIFE. 



" r 0 reader who weighs the meaning of words, 



and who has followed me intelligently, 



can suppose that I underestimate the 
Church's real influence in the moral or even in 
the civil order. Because of the widespread 
misapprehension on the subject, I have at some 
length endeavored to show what the relation 
of the Church to external forms and changes 
is not. I have maintained that the orderly in- 
stitutions of the world are produced and im- 
proved through the proximate agency, not of 
heavenly love and motive, but rather of worldly 
loves and aims ; and I have further maintained 
that such influence as is exerted through the 
Church or the man of the Church is not by 
virtue of the presence of regeneration, but by 
virtue of the presence of ideals or truths from 
the Word, which are adaptable to all condi- 
tions and appeal to the most contrary affec- 
tions and life-purposes. 

The Church is here not to do the world's 
work, but to do in the world something that it 




n6 



The Church and the World. 



cannot and will not do for itself. When the 
Church undertakes to manipulate civil affairs, 
whether as conservator or reformer, it becomes 
confounded with the world and loses its capac- 
ity for functioning distinctive spiritual uses, 
however useful it may be in other ways. To 
illustrate. The Lord seeks to create the min- 
eral kingdom and hold it to its uses by its cog- 
nate atmospheres and waters. But when ani- 
mal and plant forms of life have had their little 
day and cease to be, their dead bodies are 
seized upon by the inorganic realm of mineral, 
and turned into such stuff as is serviceable as 
a petrified foundation for the upper kingdoms 
or as a fertilizing agency for the growth of 
organisms superior to itself. So is it with reli- 
gious and ecclesiastical institutions. The forms 
and customs and traditions of so-called " hea- 
then " civilizations are the fossils of religious 
systems whose spiritual life has long since de- 
parted, for all that social knowledge which dif- 
ferentiates even the civil and sensuous man 
from the brute must at some period have come 
to the earth by revelation from the spiritual 
world. The Church becomes a political power 
only when its aim and activity are made con- 
tinuous with the external plane of the civil 
order. It can serve mineralogical uses only 



The Church's Influence on External Life, iij 

by becoming mineral. It is most alive exter- 
nally or politically when it is most dead spir- 
itually. The palmy days of historic Christ- 
ianity were those when the disciples, without 
worldly ambition or state patronage, dwelt in 
simple faith in the Gospel, with charity toward 
the brethren and the hope of heaven in their 
hearts. Its death-knell was sounded when in 
the person of Constantine the Church mount- 
ed the throne of the Caesars. So, again, in re- 
action against hoary social abuses the Church 
as Reformer was most efficient and beneficent 
in the two centuries when with one foot in the 
grave it awaited the funeral ceremony of the 
Last Judgment. The theology of the Reform- 
ers was Ptolemaic, and their spirituality a very 
nondescript quantity ; but no one who knows 
the history of Switzerland, Holland, and Scot- 
land can have the least doubt that the Refor- 
mation was a fountain of civil progress. Cal- 
vinism was the cradle of democracy, and with- 
out it we should have had no Declaration of 
Independence. 

The same law is seen in the perpetuation 
of the form of the Church after it has altogeth- 
er outlived its spiritual usefulness. The Lord 
holds Church organizations to real spiritual ac- 
tivity just as long and as far as possible, but 



n8 The Church and the World. 



when it is no longer possible He suffers them 
to decline into agencies of use on a lower lev- 
el. This is the principle embodied in the 
parable of the unjust steward. When men 
will not render the full amount of their indebt- 
edness in the oil and wheat of spiritual motive 
and obedience, the Church as a shrewd stew- 
ard compounds for the partial payment in 
moral righteousness grounded in self-love and 
love of the world. The Lord commends the 
unjust steward because this righteousness is of 
immense objective value to the social econo- 
my. Hence, although since the Last Judg- 
ment our current Catholic and Protestant or- 
thodoxies are as dead as a door-nail in all spir- 
itual respects, the external forms are contin- 
ued of the Lord's Divine Providence for the 
sake of the restraints they exercise over the 
wild beast of evil passion in the masses of 
men. A brilliant and learned rabbi once de- 
clared in my study that the Roman Catholic 
Church deserves all praise, because, " It saves 
its sons from drunkenness and its daughters 
from prostitution : which is all that any Church 
can do" This verdict of a consummated 
Jewry on a consummated Rome blurts out 
the truth concerning every Church as soon as 
it ceases to aim exclusively at spiritual uses. 



The Church 's Influence on External Life, ng 

Henceforth it fails to introduce men into the 
interior, positive, spontaneous, creative right- 
eousness of the kingdom of God, and makes 
them contented with having escaped gross and 
glaring vice. Sins against God are too fine 
for it to diagnose and heal : it is competent 
only to exercise a police surveillance over 
crimes against the world. 

So that it may be set down as a maxim 
that whatever may be the legitimate province 
of the spiritual Church of God in reference to 
the civil order and its external or material 
changes, it is not the exercise of an outward 
moulding influence flowing directly or continu- 
ously from its conscious aim and definite exer- 
tion : for in order to this it must first die, or 
cease to be itself. Former Churches died 
down to the level of the world, because after 
all their religious apprehension was only in ac- 
cordance with the letter of the Word, and so 
they had no understanding of the art of living 
in the world without being of the world or ca- 
tering to its evils. But the New Church is the 
crown of Churches because it is a living spirit- 
ual Church based upon the internal sense of t 
the Word, and by its genuine doctrines it is 
fully equipped to lead men into true interior 
life which makes all external things serve 



120 



The Church and the World. 



heavenly ends. Consequently it is able to 
wield a power that makes for righteousness on 
the plane of the world without crawling prone 
along the lines of worldly aims and worldly 
methods. On its own plane it can do its own 
work for eternal ends in such a way as contig- 
uously and correspondently to exert a mighty 
influence in the most external spheres of social 
life. 

This takes place in two ways. The Church 
first and last is the teacher of the Word. The 
New Church must teach the spiritual sense of 
the Word, and in order to do this with efficien- 
cy must make use of the ample treasury of 
knowledge concerning the spiritual world from 
" things heard and seen" and of the, far-reach- 
ing philosophy of Providence and life con- 
tained in Swedenborg's books. Now, it is 
quite impossible for any one to enter under- 
standingly into any New-Church doctrine con- 
cerning man and his relations to God or his 
neighbor or his surroundings or himself with- 
out forming an entirely new habit of thinking 
about the world and its uses. Quite aside 
from the matter of regeneration, this new ac- 
tivity of enlightened thought soon makes it- 
self felt in the spread of sounder ideas of so- 
ciety and saner estimates of private and public 



The Church's Influence on External Life. 121 

life. The results of the proclamation and dis- 
semination of New-Church truths are discern- 
ible on all hands in the improved tone of men's 
purely natural ideals. That doctrine which 
the Church enunciates to save the soul is 
adopted by the natural man to improve his 
mind and manners. God's will in a sense will 
get done on earth as it is in heaven when the 
knowledge we have of heaven shall be so sci- 
entifically explicable that the man of the world 
can see that its external conditions supply him 
with a social ideal far more profitable and quite 
as practicable as anything that has ever yet 
been tried. 

The second way in which the Church af- 
fects the external life of society is by impart- 
ing a new interior quality. This work is all its 
own. It rightly aims to exert as large an in- 
fluence as possible of this sort. While it may 
well hesitate about external changes in the 
material or constitutive forms of the civil or- 
der before men's enlightened self-love can ap- 
preciate them, it need never fear to push too 
far its power to improve men's ideals and aims 
under the institutions which now exist. Let 
the dust forms be quarried and moulded by 
worldly hands : it is the Church's business to 
infuse into them the breath of a nobler life. 



122 



The Church and the World. 



" As genuine goods and truths are from no other 
origin than from the God of heaven, they described 
[the four ages represented by gold, silver, copper, 
and iron] according to the states of the Church with 
men ; for all the civil states of kingdoms in respect 
to justice and judgment have their existence, their 
vigor, and their life from and according to the states 
of the Church" (Coronis, 2). 

Precisely here we touch the nerve of the 
whole subject. While the spiritual Church of 
God has no interest in the world and its 
changing forms for natural ends, it has every 
interest for spiritual ends. The world does 
not know why it is here ; it has no power to 
give significance to its ceaseless whirl, or as 
of itself to fall in line with Providential pur- 
poses. No judgment or justice inheres in the 
promise or potency of the stuff whereof it is 
made. All that must come down from above. 
Wherefore the Church is not here to stand like 
a celestial idiot helplessly gaping at the grue- 
some spectacular of parties and nations pirou- 
etting in a political dance of death. It is 
here in order that from its superior plane 
of thought and life it may form a public con- 
science that will direct the popular and gov- 
ernmental power to the rational execution of 
just designs in all domestic conditions and all 
foreign relations. The New Church does 



The Church! s Influence on External Life. 123 

know what the world is for, and its business is 
to tell it so. In its preaching it must not skip 
that amplitude of doctrine which instructs 
that the earth is the foundation of heaven ; 
that the world is the birth-place and training- 
school of every immortal; that character can 
be formed only in society ; that the external 
limits and moulds the internal ; that only as 
man is faithful in the natural little can he be 
faithful in the spiritual much, and only by the 
proper husbandry of unrighteous mammon 
can he be qualified for the use of the true 
riches of the kingdom of God ; that unenlight- 
ened selfishness is moral suicide ; that societies 
and nations are but man writ large, and that 
what is wicked in the smaller is more wicked 
in the larger form ; that all monopoly is of the 
genius of highway robbery, and every big na- 
tion that bullies a little one is quite as con- 
temptible as the brute who kicks a child; that 
there are clearly defined laws of charity for 
all civic functionaries and for all citizens in 
their relations to their country. The New 
Church has enough social truth to fill with 
justice and judgment the civil forms of all the 
nations of the world. The earth is the Lord's 
and the fullness thereof ; and the true under- 
standing and propagation of the Word would 



I2 4 



The Church and the World, 



so let spiritual light into every rat-hole of pri- 
vate meanness and public villainy that the self- 
regarding man could find no comfort out of 
hell except in the degree that he served such 
manifest uses to the social body as were rati- 
fied by actual correspondence to Divine order. 

There is nothing more lamentable or ab- 
surd than the insane touchiness with which 
many men— even so-called New-Churchmen — 
regard their political opinions. They resent 
the illustration of exalted or enlarged ideas as 
sore eyes resent the light. They would vote 
all ventilation of their cherished theories to be 
improper. This intolerance springs from the 
citizen's egotistic sense (especially if he or 
one of his relations happens to have done 
his public duty) that in some way he owns the 
country, and also from distrust in the Divine 
Providence and contempt for other citizens, 
which make him feel that unless he can have 
his way things must culminate in a grand 
smash. It is the manifest duty of a Church 
with such an abundance of doctrine on the sub- 
ject as ours, to lead men to dissociate their 
ideas of civil and moral order from their tur- 
gid personal emotions. A people so instruct- 
ed and so cultured would come spontaneously 
to the light, and court fair and competent crit- 



The Church's Influence on External Life. 125 

icism of every principle or institution or meas- 
ure. A Church that proclaimed as a practi- 
cable ideal that all intolerance in things po- 
litical should be shunned as a sin against God, 
would be a remnant in the midst of the land 
that like the heart of a teal-tree would infuse 
a saner, juster quality into every branch and 
twig. The Lord's Divine Wisdom rules and 
overrules all the distinct minutiae of every na- 
tion's life, and nothing is more evident on the 
page of historic progress than that what each 
generation has regarded as an indispensable 
blessing was rancorously condemned by the 
preceding generation. On the other hand, 
only as a majority is prepared to appreciate 
new conditions can they come to stay, and na- 
tions like individuals must learn many useful 
lessons by bitter and apparently avoidable ca- 
lamity. Moreover, each man is but a minute 
factor in the national life, and his personal will 
as such is rightly of small significance to the 
whole body. If so be that his will makes one 
with the truth that is best for his country, his 
highest usefulness lies in co-operating by his 
prudence with the Divine Providence of the 
Lord. What good the citizen may do to his 
community or nation can be done with fair- 
mindedness to all opinions and a courteous re- 



126 



The Church and the World. 



gard for the rights of every fellow-citizen. In 
any event, there is no place for the screams of 
passion or the sulks of disappointment. 

We are clearly taught in New-Church doc- 
trine that the country is every man's neighbor 
in a very high sense — in a much higher sense 
than any individual or society is his neighbor. 
He must love his country and do it every pos- 
sible good. But no man can love what he 
does not know, and in order to do good he 
must be in possession of the truths that make 
for the welfare of the object to which the good 
is to be done. Hence it is the duty of the 
Church, as the teacher of true charity, to insist 
on her children developing the right mental at- 
titude toward the institutions, problems, and 
necessities of the commonwealth. Ignorance 
or indifference concerning the welfare of one's 
country should be shunned as a sin against 
God. Yet it has not been uncommon among 
us to be told that the reformation of the land 
must result from the rectification of the indi- 
vidual's private internal life. For example, 
the text, " Cleanse first that which is within 
the cup and platter, that the outside of them 
may be clean also," has been made the basis 
of instruction concerning the Church and re- 
forms, and the lesson derived from it has been 



The Church's Influence on External Life. 127 

that men who were getting their own hearts 
and lives right according to the principles of 
regeneration were so far forth cleansing the 
inside of the nation's character, and that from 
this would come the civil and moral cleansing 
of the nation's conduct. Now, we are told by 
Swedenborg that to cleanse that which is with- 
in the cup and platter is to purify the thoughts 
and affections, and that if this be done the 
outside of speech and action will be clean also. 
It is quite right to apply this law to nations as 
well as to persons ; but in doing so is it not 
manifestly illogical to change the application 
of the conclusion to suit the larger form unless 
at the same time a similar change be made 
in the application of the premise? We must 
not say to men, Go and be decent in your 
families and honest in your business, knowing 
that if you shun your private evils as sins 
against God, the renovation of national life is 
assured. Non sequitur. No man's reforma- 
tion or regeneration can by any possibility ex- 
tend beyond the truths he knows and espouses. 
The inside of the cup and platter for a father 
or a tailor is not the inside of the cup and 
platter for the American Republic or for any 
citizen in his relation to the Republic. A man 
may be a good father or a good tailor in Ger- 



128 The Church aiid the World. 



many or France or America indifferently; but 
he cannot be a good American citizen, wheth- 
er born at home or abroad, until he learns and 
obeys the special truths that make our institu- 
tions distinctively American and that work for 
the present behoof of the commonwealth. 
The inside of the cup and platter of American 
national life can be made clean only in the de- 
gree that the people and the government know 
the truths of sound political economy and 
have the moral impulse of good citizenship 
(from whatsoever spiritual motive) which im- 
pels them to enter into the common good of 
those truths. When the thoughts and affec- 
tions of the people are thus right toward their 
country, then the outside of political profes- 
sion and performance will be made clean also. 

Not only is the Church concerned in the 
spiritual use of the world as the external thea- 
tre of man's internal life, but it has also a deep 
interest in all outward institutions and events 
as expressing or representing human qualities. 
Society is but a magnified form of man, and 
all its performances and vicissitudes, prosperi- 
ties and retributions, manifest the principles 
which are universal in all forms of human life. 
We have not such elaborate descriptions in 
the Word of the conditions and qualities of 



The Church 's Influence on External Life. i2g 

ancient and oriental nations in order to divert 
our attention from the good or evil of modern 
and occidental peoples and states. Rather, 
we have the sacred histories of the letter and 
their transcendent spiritual meanings in order 
that we may know man in all latitudes and 
all times. There is a sense in which Whittier's 
couplet has for us a correspondential lesson. 

"The heavens are glassed in Merrimack: 
What more could Jordan render back? " 

For while it is true that our knowledge of the 
internal or purely spiritual sense of the Word 
is a unique revelation displaying an exception- 
al Providence in the historical dramatization 
of the glorifying of the Lord's humanity and 
the regenerating of man's personality, still 
precisely the same internal and external social 
principles operate now as then; and in a very 
definite sense are we able to apply to present 
affairs the laws of cause and effect which are 
exhibited in the interior or moral historical 
sense of the Word. Swedenborg was an apos- 
tle of lucidity, and the last of his books is rich 
almost to redundancy with illustrations bor- 
rowed from the facts of common knowledge. 
What can be found that will better aid the 
general reader to understand interior prin- 

9 



i jo The Church and the World. 



ciples than the working and influence of insti- 
tutions with which he is familiar or those strik- 
ing occurrences or exhibitions which forcefully 
arrest everybody's attention ? One great spir- 
itual use of the social aggregate is to reveal 
man to himself. Whatever is out there was 
first in the human heart, whence flow the issues 
of life; and in the corporate damnabilities of 
commerce and politics we have the calcium 
light exaggerations of evils of affection and 
errors of thought in every one among us, 
which must be shunned as sins against God 
before we can enter the kingdom of heaven. 
The world and its belongings and its doings 
are the lawful stage properties of every teach- 
er of spiritual truth, and he must not allow 
himself to be deprived of the use of his tools 
by any mock charity in behalf of thin-skinned 
individuals who happen to be either the pa- 
trons or the beneficiaries of any social evil. 
Swedenborg, as cited in a preceding chapter, 
did not hesitate to illustrate the spiritual im- 
portance of natural environment by a very 
uncomplimentary estimate of petty German 
princedoms, although it might have so hurt the 
precious feelings of the Duke of Mecklen- 
burg as to make him swear incontinently over 
his beer-mug. 



Miscellaneous Essays. 



V 



I . 

THE HEART OF REFORM. 

THE reformer is a roughshod denouncer of 
iniquities and exterminator of abuses. 
The singleness of his eye consists in see- 
ing only one special evil or set of evils, for in 
the mind of the thoroughgoing reformer one 
reform does not seem to have any logical con- 
nection with another. Temperance has no or- 
ganic relation to the sanitary state of tene- 
ments, the woman's cause is in no way allied 
to co-operation or profit-sharing, the abolition 
of capital punishment is bound by no tie to 
civil service reform or a pure ballot, the food 
and dress reform in no sense joins hands with 
the single tax or the nationalization of land. 
To each reformer his own pet reform is as big 
as the world. 

There is very good reason for this segrega- 
tion of interest among reformers. As with an 
individual there is no amendment so long as 
he repents of his evils en masse, but only when 
he spots them singly and overcomes them, so 
there can be no wholesale or abstract removal 
of disorders on the part of society. Society 



ij/f. Miscellaneous Essays. 



must see its evils before it can put* them away, 
and it can see them only one by one as they 
are brought to the surface and made to stand 
out in clear definition. Here is the use of the 
boisterous, pertinacious reformer. He must 
be at it early and late, lamming away with his 
one idea, and so by the very perverseness of 
his insistence prevent society from resting easy 
until the assaulted abuse is remedied. It is 
only thus that congresses and parliaments and 
the voting populus can ever be got to do their 
duty. 

Moreover, reforms belong to the surface, 
and hence must necessarily be sectional. The 
circumference implies a vast area, and no 
specific activity that is begun on the surface, 
and deals with external reforms as such, can 
cover a very large territory. It is in the socio- 
logical world as it is in the world of nature : 
the facts of observation are countless, and ev- 
ery one who studies facts will find them multi- 
plying ad infinitum in every field ; and so long 
as he looks outwardly he will be absorbed in 
the minutiae of his chosen department, with 
little understanding of what lies beyond. 

But sociological phenomena are not all cir- 
cumference. Every outward thing has an in- 
side. ' Hence all true and orderly reforms 



The Heart of Reform, 



which strike the periphery of daily life are 
the external manifestations of interior princi- 
ples and forces which retrace their way to one 
central fountain head. And this fountain of 
principles is not by any means continuous with 
the conduits and reservoirs of its outward 
manifestation and reception. If it were, it 
could not correspond, and God's spiritual or 
social creation is effected necessarily by con- 
tiguous correspondence. Thus only can we 
have active and passive, content and recipient. 
The heavenly life comes down from one dis- 
crete degree of receptivity and activity to an- 
other, until forces which were Divine in their 
genesis are so modified by celestial, spiritual, 
rational, moral, scientific, sensuous, and cor- 
poreal qualities, that ultimately they utilize the 
most selfish instincts and the most unspiritual 
instrumentalities in the achievement of benefi- 
cial ends. 

Hence, as matter of fact, the removal of 
great evils and the adoption of manifest im- 
provements do not emanate from the bluster- 
ing reformer as their fons et origo, but come 
primarily from the quiet and genuine lovers of 
order who belong to the planes of interior life. 
Every great movement that has blessed and 
saved society has taken its rise as a desirable 



ij6 Miscellaneous Essays. 



and possible ideal with that mystic body of 
the elect, who in their hearts acknowledge the 
qualities of the Divine Character. The aboli- 
tion of slavery, for example, both in the Brit- 
ish colonies and in our own Republic, had its 
real origin in the noble hearts that loved liber- 
ty and their fellows, and who brought down 
the Divine regard for mercy and justice to the 
common thought of men. Then it spread as 
a deep sentiment of freedom forming a public 
opinion, to be eventually made use of by the 
coarser and more unscrupulous hand of poli- 
tics, w r hich gained its own ends by ultimating 
the truth of personal liberty in the enfreeing 
of the embondaged slaves. 

The social health of the nation in our own 
times, when on all sides we see multitudes of 
the citizens possessed by the devils of avarice 
and display, depends no more upon any out- 
ward arrangements that are making than 
upon the heavenly influences that give vitality 
and permanence to the spiritual consociations 
which make that " Church" without which the 
human race would " become insane and per- 
ish." The. troubles among rich and poor, capi- 
talists and laborers, landlords and tenants, tax- 
ers and taxed, and kindred problems, will find 
their solutions in remedies which, whatever 



The Heart of Reform. 137 



outward agencies or agitations may be neces- 
sary to give them effect, will issue from the as- 
pirations and ideals of those that love common 
justice between man and man and common 
equity in the utilization and distribution of the 
bounties of nature. 

Precisely this truth gives what ought to be 
the New-Churchman's point of view in regard 
to the world's reform movements. He ought 
to be in the interior love of the human race, 
which would lead him to an understanding of 
social laws and human needs, and give him an 
interest in the spiritual side of every righteous 
reform. He ought to be in the life, the spirit, 
the heart of reform. And this would enable 
him to find his own place as an external work- 
er among the various reform agencies, so far 
as he can co-operate with them in freedom and 
rationality. 

But let no reformer, New-Church or other, 
imagine that his reform will fill the whole bill, 
or lies at the heart of life. In the very nature 
of the case, the best of reforms belong to one 
patch in space and one stratum in time. The 
world moves on, and as it moves society must 
be on the alert to put away every condition of 
affairs which yesterday may have been a good 
thing but is now an evil, and to adopt every 



ij8 Miscellaneous Essays. 



new measure which will enhance the prosperi- 
ty of the commonweal. Only this ceaseless 
reform can keep the social mass intact and 
clean. But the spiritual life of the race comes 
down from above, and is ever young and ever 
strong and ever sweet. It comes as a vital in- 
flux inspiring men to move on to better things, 
and then adopts and abides in such social 
states as they consent to provide. The re- 
former and his reforms perpetually decrease 
and pass away as each provisional improve- 
ment gives place to the next, but the spiritual 
life increases and endures as the perennial 
heart of endless progress to the children of 
men. 



II. 



C^SAR AND THE CHURCH. 
URING the long period of transition when 



Judaea was passing from a state of per- 



fect autocracy to one of complete sub- 
jection as a Roman province, a great many 
pretended Messiahs arose who in their patri- 
otic zeal attempted to stir up the people to 
throw off the foreign yoke. In the midst of 
these appeared the Christ of the Gospel. 
Nothing seemed more impossible for him than 
to convince his hearers that he was not a po- 
litical agitator or social reformer. Friend and 
foe alike looked upon him as aiming at the 
natural and temporal benefit of his nation. 
This want of comprehension of his true mis- 
sion led to his final rejection and crucifixion. 
One after another of the pseudo-Christs had 
been pursued and hunted down by the con- 
quering legions ; but their following had been 
but limited, and the national authorities could 
clear themselves in the eyes of Rome. But 
Jesus seemed to be having a vast number of 
believers, and in their alarm the chief priests 
and Pharisees feared that his ruin as a traitor 




14.0 Miscellaneous Essays. 



to Rome would involve the ruin of them all. 
" If we let him thus alone, all men will believe 
on him : and the Romans will come and take 
away both our place and our nation." From 
that day, we read, " they took counsel that 
they might put him to death. " The Christ 
was crucified because men failed to see that 
his kingdom was not of this world. The first 
Christian Church grew old and died for pre- 
cisely the same reason. The New Church 
stands on the earth to-day to perceive and to 
proclaim that the kingdom of the Christ is the 
kingdom of the heavens, and belongs to the 
realm of interior affection and thought, to the 
spiritual springs of activity. 

Perhaps we see this principle of our Lord's 
teaching most clearly in his answer to the 
Pharisees and the partisans of Herod, who 
sought to get rid of Him by convicting Him 
either of treason to his native country or of 
disloyalty to Rome. " What thinkest thou ? 
Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar or not?" 
In the answer we have announced a law of 
universal social significance. "Why tempt ye 
me, ye hypocrites? Show me the tribute 
money. And they brought unto him a penny. 
And He saith unto them, Whose is this image 
and superscription ? They say unto him, Cae- 



Ccesar and the Church. 141 



sar's, Then saith He unto them, Render 
therefore unto Caesar the things that are Cae- 
sar's, and unto God the things that are God's." 
Now let it be noted that this is no commenda- 
tion of Caesar as the representative or personi- 
fication of any national or international policy. 
It is not the approval or ratification of any 
special political doctrine or system of govern- 
ment. For, as matter of fact, it would be hard 
to define the exact meaning of Roman institu- 
tions at the time the words were spoken. It 
was near the middle of the rule of Tiberius, 
and while the spirit of monarchy was con- 
stantly growing, the republican constitutional 
forms were still retained. Indeed, this indefi- 
niteness and confusion of Roman politics 
throughout the eighth century of the city is 
apparent to every historical student. For ex- 
ample, Merivale, writing of the Romans under 
the Empire, begins with the death of Sulla in 
78 b. c, while Ferguson, treating of the Re- 
public, brings his narrative down to the reign 
of Caligula, 37 A. d. Clearly, our Lord's 
words do not aim to teach us the kind of poli- 
tics that would be best for the man of the 
world. 

But Caesar was the synonym of the power 
which then prevailed in the civil order. His 



i £2 Miscellaneous Essays. 



arm swayed the destinies of the kingdoms of 
* the earth. Unless there had been a certain 
right in his might, he never could have ruled 
the world. In Palestine, for instance, the pres- 
ence of the Roman power had brought a new 
era of peace, commerce, and social prosperity. 
If Judaea had been more worthy of its inde- 
pendence than Caesar was to rule, depend upon 
it Caesar would never have ruled. If in the 
future Caesar's tyranny should outweigh his 
usefulness or the people should become able 
to do without him better than with him, then 
unquestionably Caesar's throne would be laid 
in the dust. But as matter of fact, just at that 
juncture Caesar's was the most expedient au- 
thority. Therefore, whether he wished it or 
not, the wisest course for the natural man was 
to render unto Caesar the things that were 
Caesar's. 

Man as an external form of life is made in 
the image of the world, and as such he is 
bound to pay tribute to whatsoever Caesar is 
on the throne of affairs. Now, all a man's 
carnal and selfish interests are in and of the 
world. He is born loving the world and 
worldly things. He desires that the world 
shall get on and that he shall get on in the 
world. The world and he are of one stuff. 



Ccesar and the Church, 14.3 

Hence it is written, " I pray not for the 
world." Such prayer would be a wasted gra- 
tuity. The world can look out for itself. To 
pray for the world would be like praying that 
water might have an inclination to run down 
stream. It is the nature of the world to make 
the worldly best of itself. If men will not 
mend their Caesars from self-interest and 
worldly wisdom, they will stay unmended to 
the end of time. 

But man is not born of the material of the 
kingdom of heaven. He has no natural incli- 
nation to render unto God the things that are 
God's. If ever he discovers that beneath the 
show and shadow of the world he has a real 
need of spiritual and Divine things, it is only 
because the Lord and the Church instruct 
him. He has to be reborn or regenerated by 
slow degrees into the internal image and like- 
ness of God. Hence, it is not easy for him to 
live the life of heaven, and thus pay tribute to 
the Divine. In order to this, he must do the 
works of repentance: he must shun his evils 
as sins : he must bear his cross. Therefore, 
" I pray for those whom thou hast given me 
out of the world/' Precisely here we have 
the pith and marrow of the Church. The 
Church's business is to emphasize the antithe- 



144- Miscellaneous Essays. 



sis which subsists between the world and 
heaven. Its absorbing aim is to assert and re- 
assert man's capacity for spiritual life ; to in- 
struct, to support, and to encourage him in his 
interior experiences on the way to heaven; 
and to induce him to make it more and more 
the supreme employment of his life to render 
unto God the things that are God's. 



III. 



NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 
HE Divine idea in all tribal and national 



organization is a condition of social se- 



curity and plenitude that will enable 
men freely to evolve the heavenly and spiritual 
possibilities which are treasured in the depths 
of their interior or rational nature. " Many 
are called, but few are chosen " to realize the 
sublimest heights of celestial manhood : but 
God's aim in society is provisionally to allow 
all men irrespective of their spiritual achieve- 
ments an ample satisfaction of their natural 
wants. Spiritual life can be realized by men 
only in so far as they cordially embrace it. 
Hence the Providential purpose in national 
development always has in view such a social 
state as will be a plane on which a man can be 
allowed to yield his unaffected allegiance to 
the inward reality or to the outward seeming. 
The Divine Life — embracing in its beneficent 
scope the all of love and wisdom, the sum of 
goodness and truth — being already the legiti- 
mate inheritance of every one who wears the 
human form, society can do nothing toward 




10 



146 Miscellaneous Essays. 



conferring spiritual or real substance on men. 
So that the sole use of right government is to 
remove the obstacles in the way of the logical 
evolution of man's inward capabilities, or to 
furnish that defence and control which are 
necessary to give freedom to every member of 
the common body and at the same time to re- 
strain him from intrenching on the rights of 
other members. In effect, then, true govern- 
ment is never anything but the willing servant 
or minister of men in matters which relate to 
the foundational affairs of human life. 

It is because this principle has been ig- 
nored that the governments of the past pre- 
sent so unhandsome a spectacle on the page 
of history. Government has so often failed to 
authenticate its Divine mission because it has 
assumed a magisterial instead of a ministerial 
attitude. It has pretended that it existed in 
its own right, that its authority was grounded 
in some intrinsic virtue itself possessed, instead 
of in the " consent of the governed." Its max- 
im has been that "the king could do no wrong," 
because he had a Divine right to be obeyed. 
However beneficent and humanitary national 
institutions may have been in their incipiency, 
they become monstrous burdens when fossil- 
ized into perpetual monuments of their origi- 



National Righteousness. 14.J 



nal uses. Because the governing factors in 
national life have allied themselves with forms 
and institutions which had ceased palpably to 
serve the people, society has been convulsed 
with revolution after revolution. The Divine 
purpose which works through all national life, 
and which is the fountain of our social destiny, 
can tolerate no government but that which re- 
sponds to and reflects the free and rational as- 
pirations of the popular heart and mind. 

The American nation is unique in its gene- 
sis and genius. Our government is discrim- 
inated from all pre-existing forms by a dis- 
crete degree, like the radical difference that 
forever lifts an organic kingdom of nature 
above the inorganic. Other governments have 
sought to act on men as electricity or heat 
acts dynamically on physical atoms, but in the 
American idea government expresses the law 
of the nation's spontaneous evolution, the ex- 
pansion and growth of a form of life whose 
procreative seed is in itself. For the first time 
in the history of the world a people was found 
with sufficient confidence in human nature to 
frame a government on the basis of all men's 
equality before God and their inalienable right 
to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." 
And the blessing of God has rested on this na- 



1^.8 Miscellaneous Essays. 



tion with an infinite benediction, crowning it 
with a fullness of prosperity and carrying it 
unscathed through the severest trials, not be- 
cause American men and women are better 
than others, but because the initiative and 
dominating principles of the constitution and 
polity of these United States are the divinest 
and most humane the sun has yet beamed 
upon. The sole concern God has for any na- 
tion's existence and continuance is that it se- 
cure a basis for the development of mankind's 
social and spiritual life. 

It follows, then, that political righteousness 
is nothing more or less than the equal care of 
the material or basic interests of all the citi- 
zens. Whatever exalts the welfare of one 
class at the expense of the welfare of another 
is inimical to the national life. Every eccle- 
siastical, family, political, or commercial clique 
that seeks to appropriate the patronage of 
government, and to become established as pe- 
culiarly national in contrast with other institu- 
tions in the land, is guilty of foul treason to 
the American or humanitary idea, and deserves 
only our cordial and abiding condemnation. 
It is an insult to true American sentiment that 
the laws should be so framed and administered 
that multitudes of citizens should be kept in 



National Righteousness. 14.9 



abject slavery to their backs and stomachs, 
while a few hold possession of more land and 
wealth than their descendants can make a ra- 
tional use of in half a dozen generations. The 
country has ample resources, with wise hus- 
bandry, to satisfy the reasonable ambition for 
wealth of men of financial genius, and at the 
same time to place every willing workingman 
in such a degree of liberation from his physi- 
cal necessities as will allow him, according to 
the Divine intention, freely to damn or save 
himself as regards his inward or spiritual affili- 
ations. 

A profound regard for the universal welfare 
of the people in a material sense must charac- 
terize the mental attitude and political conduct 
of every one who would be a true statesman 
or ruler according to the rational and humane 
conception of those who have caught the spirit 
of man's genuine political life, as that flows 
from the Divine Idea and has been measurably 
reflected in the Declaration of Independence. 
Nations like individuals cannot remain in statu 
quo. They must either advance along the line 
of their legitimate evolution or degenerate 
into unattractive and unproductive types. The 
Divine benediction will not continue on the 
government and on the people for the sake of 



i jo Miscellaneous Essays. 



the righteousness of the fathers. Popular vir- 
tues in years that are gone do not invalidate 
the vices of to-day or save from their retribu- 
tion to-morrow. The inexorable laws of life 
call for a present and persistent political right- 
eousness. And that righteousness lies within 
the reach of every American who is called 
upon to perform the functions of government. 
For political " holiness " or health does not 
require the effusive piety that is so popular in 
ecclesiastical circles, neither does it demand 
the genuine heavenly graces which win our ad- 
miration as they are approximated in domestic 
life, and which we conceive of as flourishing 
in their fullness in angelic spheres. But what 
we need above all things in politics is a re- 
sumption of those rugged, manly virtues, 
which unfortunately are conspicuous by their 
absence — courage, truthfulness, and common 
justice. The predominance of these elements 
in the mutual relations of society and govern- 
ment would insure such a state of natural or 
material equality and prosperity as would give 
a sufficient millennium for rational men, for it 
would leave all in freedom and peace to culti- 
vate the spiritual side of their character, to 
which legislation can never render a positive 
but only a negative service. 



IV. 



CIVILIZATION AND CHRISTIANITY, 
CIVILIZATION, as every student of his- 



tory is aware, is produced by the individ- 



ual man endeavoring to develop himself, 
and the collective man seeking to improve his 
condition. It may be said that civilization is 
the conjunction of man's private and public 
efforts at self-perfection. 

Its function is to rescue men from indis- 
criminate and unindividualized barbarism. It 
is clearly evident that when a man begins to 
affirm his sovereignty over nature and the 
senses, he is acting for his own advantage. 
In fact, for the first time the term " own " be- 
comes applicable to him. Hitherto he has 
been lost in the wide-weltering mass of his 
kind. But now he chooses a style of life that 
is proper to himself. His ownhood is born. 
For this is the meaning of Swedenborg's Latin 
word, proprium. The stream of life flowing 
into a man's pvoprium gives him the intensely 
sweet sense of selfhood — a sense that he can 
no more get rid of than he can get rid of the 
sensation that the sun rises and sets. No man 




152 Miscellcuieons Essays. 



ever yet has sensibly felt the scientific truth 
that the earth turns on its axis. If one could 
actually feel the earth's diurnal or annual mo- 
tion his whole physical constitution would 
collapse. He would have no steady and se- 
cure basis of fact upon which to build his nat- 
ural hope and development. Precisely so with 
the sensation of proprinm. If a man sensibly 
felt that his own life was but the phenomenal 
appearance of God's life in him, his only 
groundwork for personal and internal evolu- 
tion would explode, and his creatureship would 
be swept away so utterly that no possibility of 
intellectual or moral sanity would remain. 
Thus the sense of property in one's self — or 
the propriurn — is the Providential underpinning 
of all moral and spiritual existence. It is the 
natural conscious starting-point of every angel, 
and without it heaven would be but a benig- 
nant castle in the air. 

Now, civilization is the logical fruition of 
this sense of property in one's self. Brutes 
are incapable of civilization simply because 
they are destitute of a propriurn or self-propri- 
etorship which can be developed into a moral 
or self-governing respect for tneutn and tuum. 
To the animal all things are mine till a strong- 
er animal has come. The law in the brute do- 



Civilization and Christianity \ ijj 



main which carries all before it is " the survi- 
val of the fittest " only in the sense of the big- 
gest and most pugnacious. Civilization begins 
when men perceive that they can do some- 
thing or have something which gives them a 
distinction above their fellows. It arrays the 
individual against his kind. As civilization 
advances it gives men more and more outward 
evidence of their worth, so intensifying the 
sensation of their intrinsic value and offering 
new incentives to outstrip in the race. The 
horse is forever identified with all horses. But 
man's proprium is perpetually creating distinc- 
tions, and stiffening the lines which divide the 
rights to property of one man or class from 
those of another. Hence, in the most civilized 
nations the sense of property is most intense, 
and wealth is proportionably secure. Hand- 
in-hand with the respect for dollars and cents 
goes the regard for the distinctions accruing 
from moral and intellectual differences. It is 
a delusion to imagine that moral and intellec- 
tual distinctions are inherently or essentially 
above the distinctions of property. They are 
but varied species of the same genus ; nay, 
they are co-ordinate branches from one stalk. 
They are all developed directly from the pro- 
prium. Civilization in its supremest form is 



*54 



Miscellaneous Essays. 



but the concretion and aggregation of proper- 
ty. It is the outward affirmation of the inde- 
structible sensation a man feels that he has life 
in himself. Hence civilization has a profound 
regard for strong men's rights, because only 
thus can it maintain itself. It lays a powerful 
hand on "mine," and also protects "thine," 
for it feels that while thine is secure mine is 
out of danger. Still it affirms that it will hold 
on to mine, and if anything must go it shall 
be what is thine. In other words, civilization 
is subject to the law that governs all streams, 
and can never flow higher than its source. Its 
fountain is the selfhood, and it must forever 
be chaarcterized by the quality and limitations 
of a self-centering, self-perfecting process. 

Christianity is just what civilization is not. 
The whole drama of the Christ's life and death 
and resurrection is the assertion of the insuffi- 
ciency of natural evolution to man's require- 
ments, and the absolute necessity of a Divine 
indwelling within human nature and the de- 
scent of a supreme and immaculate life out of 
heaven from God. Of this perennial spiritual 
incarnation or tabernacling of God in man's 
soul, the Gospel verity is the perfect and last- 
ing symbol. 

Of course, when I speak of Christianity as 



Civilization and Christianity. 155 



contrasted with civilization, I refer not to the 
professional Church of history, which has been 
content to be the mercenary body-servant of 
civilization, but to that interior life which is 
laid open in the Gospel, and which is the es- 
sence of all divinely-animated religion or all 
spiritual manifestation and growth in man. 

Spiritual Christianity does not antagonize 
natural civilization as a means, but only as an 
end. As it is the function of civilization to 
reduce the passions of an untamed and unclean 
barbarism to the sovereignty of law and self- 
government, it is the province of Christianity 
to make the proudest civilization her footstool. 
Mankind's natural evolution is competent to 
meet the utmost demands of terrestrial and 
temporal necessities. A magnificent future 
lies before the natural man. The world was 
never younger than now ; the times were never 
more pregnant with good. The earth teems 
with a fullness which will prove inexhaustible 
to an enlightened social and business instinct 
that is qualified to harvest and circulate it. 
All this fruition of natural benefaction is 
equally for angel and devil, for saint and sin- 
ner. All will be made the beneficiaries of the 
bounty of civilization, whether they inwardly 
and voluntarily ally themselves with the Di- 



ij6 Miscellaneous Essays. 



vine, or repudiate their spiritual filiation to the 
Lord. 

But Christianity summons a man to live a 
life completely transcending that which he has 
as a " civilizee." It calls upon him to be a 
man in God's own image and likeness. He is 
to do the same things that a common-sense, 
self-regarding natural man or even man-devil 
might do, but he must do them from the Lord. 
" I will now tell," says Swedenborg — " I will 
now tell how a civil and moral life is the recep- 
tacle of spiritual life : Live these laws, not 
only as civil and moral laws, but also as Divine 
laws, and you will be a spiritual man." 

Christianity is not — as it is the fashion to 
define religion — the effort of man to perfect 
himself. It is just the reverse. It is the emp- 
tying and negativing of man in himself in be- 
half of the fullness and positiveness he has in 
God. " The foxes have holes and the birds of 
the air have nests," but it is utterly impossible 
for any civilization to develop under heaven 
that of its own spontaneous accord would give 
the Son of man a place to lay his head. " My 
kingdom," said the Christ, " is not of this 
world." Hence, repentance and self-abnega- 
tion are the only path to spiritual life. The 
cross is the everlasting symbol of its progress 



Civilization and Christianity, 757 

among men on the earth. Civilization urges 
men to assert themselves, to perfect them- 
selves ; but Christianity commands them to 
humble themselves, to abase themselves. Civ- 
ilization seeks to obliterate man's identity with 
man on his natural or animal side, by distin- 
guishing him with marks of virtue, prowess, 
personal beauty, money, and landed estates. 
Christianity endeavors to wipe out these dis- 
tinctions by identifying man with man on his 
spiritual or Divine side, by livingly conjoining 
him with God and consociating him with his 
kind in a redeemed human solidarity. 



S WEDENBORG'S 

Service to Philosophy 

By S. C. Eby. 



Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson to the Author: 

" I have read your book, ' Swedenborg's Service to 
Philosophy,' with great pleasure and profit. I am glad 
you did not write it longer ; for it more wants to be read 
twelve times than to have its pages multiplied by twelve. 
Let the reader's amplified thought be new editions of it. 

"It is useful to me, because I have perhaps too much 
cast out metaphysics and what they imply of philoso- 
phy, in favor of the organic and bodily reality which at 
first sight is dominant in Swedenborg. You restore this 
field, namely, the abstract, to its rightful place ; and phi- 
losophy becomes again 'a perpetual fund of nectared 
sweets,' etc. Swedenborg himself affords ample ground 
for this; and his animal works are indeed a perpetual 
marriage of organic inductions with true abstract prin- 
ciples. 

" The order of your treatment is harmonic, and many- 
sided ; and the charity of your method is amply reward- 
ed by the globe of intuitions which you traverse. 

"I have not read anything equally gifted for a long 
time. And the whole is new to me, though its parts were 
many of them known before. It is a work that will have 
influence; for its influx shows a purpose not your own." 

The Rev. B. F. Barrett, in New Christianity : 

" Each of these subjects is treated with signal ability, 
and in a manner to arrest the attention of the deepest 
and most philosophic thinkers. In the first chapter the 
reader is introduced into 'the sphere of philosophy,' 
which is ' the realm of causes,' and is kept there through- 



out the volume. It is not easy to give in few words a 
clear idea of this thoughtful and well- written work." 

The Rev. J. C. Learned, in Unity {Unitarian) : 

" If we are not mistaken, anything from the thought- 
ful pen of Mr. Eby will be found worth reading. Certain- 
ly no writer of his school of thought with whom we are 
acquainted gives a fresher, fuller interest to his theme." 

The Rev. Adolph Roeder, in Bote der Neuen Kirche: 

" The author is well known in the New Church as one 
of our best writers, and this little work does him all hon- 
or. His style is direct, concise, strong, and crisp." 

The Rev. John Goddard, in Annual Address to Ohio Association: 
"Mr. Eby, in his admirable pamphlet on ' Sweden- 
borg's Service to Philosophy,' has opened the door to a 
new apartment of New-Church thought, which has been 
almost neglected." 

The Rev. T. F. Wright, Ph. D., in New-Jerusalem Magazine: 

"We wish to express our indebtedness to the Rev. 
S. C. Eby for printing this neat pamphlet. Beginning 
with giving evidence that the doctrines of the New 
Church contain a general philosophy, he goes on to 
touch upon the great themes of human thought, and to 
show what our system is. The reader will regret that 
the essay could not have been expanded into a volume." 

The Rev. C. H. Mann, in New-Church Messenger: 

"We have read this little brochure of Mr. Eby's with 
great pleasure. He has evidently written on this theme 
con amove. We find compacted within these four dozen 
pages a clear statement of philosophic thought in gener- 
al, and of the methods of their solution as given in the 
New Church in particular." 

48 pages. In cloth, 60 cents; in heavy paper cover, 25 cents. 

THE NEW-CHURCH BOOK-ROOM, 

Delmar and Spring Aves., St. Louis, Mo. 



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